Despite the Effect of Smoking Cessation Limiting Growth in the Number of Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) Cases, the Drug Market for NSCLC Will Increase to More Than $6 Billion in 2021, Fueled Largely by the Entry of Seven New Agents
Decision Resources
Decision Resources, one of the world’s leading research and advisory firms for pharmaceutical and healthcare issues, finds that the entry of seven new agents into the (NSCLC) drug market—and in particular the entry of two immunotherapies—in addition to increased use of Pfizer’s Xalkori will drive the NSCLC drug market to increase from $4.6 billion in 2011 to over $6 billion in 2021. This growth will occur despite generic/biosimilar erosion of key agents used in the management of NSCLC. Sales of Eli Lilly’s Alimta, a branded drug that dominated the 2011 NSCLC market, will weaken significantly in the second half of the forecast period owing to entry of generics.
The Pharmacor Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer advisory service also finds that the treatment of NSCLC is becoming increasingly personalized. The co-development of drugs and companion diagnostics will help developers achieve success in patient populations that did not appear to be commercially viable.
“The potential success of such an approach is exemplified by Xalkori and by Abbott Molecular’s Vysis ALK Break Apart FISH Probe Kit,” said Decision Resources Analyst Orestis Mavroudis-Chocholis, Ph.D. “The high response rates seen in patients selected using the companion diagnostic underlie the premium-pricing and potential reimbursement hurdles will turn a seemingly small and unprofitable patient subset into a lucrative and well-served market segment.”
The majority of agents currently in the NSCLC pipeline are being developed to target specific molecular targets and to improve the safety and efficacy of currently available chemotherapeutic approaches. In the next ten years, Decision Resources expects the launch of several agents that are positioned to treat specific subpopulations of patients—these drugs include Boehringer Ingelheim’s Tomtovok, Pfizer’s dacomitinib, Genentech/Roche/Chugai’s MetMAb, and Bristol-Myers Squibb/Ono Pharmaceutical’s nivolumab.
The , which contains detailed methods, including the modeling of current and forecast recurrence-free and overall NSCLC survival, also finds that, despite the downward effect on risk associated with smoking cessation, the number of lung cancer cases will continue to increase when aggregated across all of the seven largest mature markets—the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and Japan—due to the effect of population aging outweighing the effect of smoking cessation. This scenario varies substantially between different countries however, with cases in Spain showing a 74 percent increase through 2031, while the United Kingdom will show an 8 percent decrease over the same period.
Over the next 20 years, the number of prevented cases of lung cancer due to smoking cessation is estimated to be two million. Owing to the very poor prognosis associated with lung cancer preventable cases of the disease due to smoking cessation will result in 1.6 million prevented deaths due to lung cancer through 2031.
The increasing need to molecularly characterize tumors to select patients for targeted therapies such as Xalkori, will lead to an increase in the percentage of microscopically verified cases. As a result, the number of verified cases of all forms of lung cancer will increase after adjusting for the effects of smoking cessation and population aging. However, because non-squamous NSCLC has a weaker association with smoking than either small-cell or squamous-cell lung cancer, it will increasingly account for a larger share of the NSCLC patient population increasing from 58 percent in 2011 to 64 percent in 2031.
Decision Resources’ Pharmacor advisory service offers clients in the biopharmaceutical industry the most up-to-date information available on commercially significant disease topics.
By utilizing our proprietary Pharmacor epidemiological data, Decision Resources now provides Pharmacor Patient Flow Models covering bladder cancer, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, head and neck cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma, gastric cancer, malignant melanoma, non-small-cell lung cancer, ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, renal cell carcinoma, sarcoma and thyroid cancer. Using Pharmacor Patient Flow Models, users can build their own oncology patient flow model and/or validate the logic behind their own internal models. This interactive tool allows users to track changing disease and population dynamics over a 20-year annualized forecast, improve their modeling accuracy with clearly depicted methods and transparent assumptions and identify untapped market potential within lines of therapy. Pharmacor Patient Flow Models is available as an add-on product to the Pharmacor advisory service.
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