Merck gave a “state of the biz-nass” presentation today. Here’s their statement about it. As with every other major pharma company, they plan to
- develop more vaccines and biologic drugs
- sell more in emerging markets like India and China
- use “diversity” when they mean “diversification”
My favorite statement was this sentence on the company’s “focus”:
The Company is focused on developing novel, best-in-class or follow-on treatments for patients in primary care, specialty care, and hospital settings.
That is, they’re “focused” on making all types of drugs for all settings.
so, is this good news or bad news for me?????
It’s bad news insofar as you’ve invested in a company where the idea of “focus” is “we cover every aspect of the market.” Instead, they should’ve listed their focus as the particular therapeutic classes they cover.
The bigger news from the release is that they plan on pursuing generic versions of biologic drugs, which sounds awesome except that the FDA has no actual path of approval for generic biologics, and a slight change in the production process can lead to bad results for patients. J&J and Amgen both manufacture and market the same bio-drug for different anemia markets, but J&J made a subtle change to its production process a few years ago, and a number of patients wound up having a terrible reaction to it.
The lesson seemed to be that biologic drugs are so fine-tuned that you can’t prove equivalency (which is what you do when you file a generic application for a small-molecule drug) without doing a full set of clinical trials. And once you run a full set of clinical trials, your costs go so high that you can’t afford to market the drug very cheaply (which is the point of generics). So I’m skeptical that this is going to work out. I would be VERY leery about substituting a branded bio-drug for a “generic” one.
Also, when a company’s brilliant new strategy can be boiled down to, “We’re going to knock off our competitors’ products!”, you should probably worry.