Superior Efficacy Will Propel Vivus’s Qsymia to Become the Most Widely Used Emerging Therapy for the Treatment of Obese or Overweight Patients

Superior Efficacy Will Propel Vivus's Qsymia to Become the Most Widely Used Emerging Therapy for the Treatment of Obese or Overweight Patients

Decision Resources

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Decision Resources, one of the world's leading research and advisory firms focusing on pharmaceutical and healthcare issues, finds that novel emerging agents will experience rapid uptake owing to the high prevalence of obese or overweight individuals and the current lack of efficacious, safe and well-tolerated weight-loss drugs. Among the new agents to enter the market, Vivus's Qsymia will become the most widely used emerging therapy due to efficacy superior to its competitors. Qsymia is scheduled to launch in 2012 and will help to fulfill the need for more efficacious agents, providing greater than double the weight-loss efficacy of currently available drugs including Roche's Xenical, phentermine (UCB's Ionamin, generics) and GlaxoSmithKline's over-the-counter product Alli.

The findings from the Pharmacor topic entitled reveal that, while Arena/Eisai's Belviq received FDA approval in June and will likely launch in late 2012, weaker efficacy will put the drug at a competitive disadvantage to Qsymia.

Decision Resources forecasts the obesity drug market will grow from $359 million in 2011 to $2.4 billion in 2021 in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and Japan. Novel agents that will launch over the next decade are expected to capture 92 percent of the obesity market in 2021. In addition, the combined prevalence of obese and overweight patients in the seven countries included the analysis will rise over the 2011-2021 forecast period owing to the growth of the population aged 20 or older in the major markets. This increasing prevalence will drive continued demand for safe, efficacious weight-loss therapies.

"The launch of novel obesity agents over the next ten years will boost diagnosis and drug-treatment rates, which are currently very low. The availability of a wider variety of agents with greater efficacy will encourage both treatment-naïve patients and patients who have discontinued treatment with currently available drugs to seek diagnosis and treatment," said Decision Resources Analyst Gideon Heap. "Lack of reimbursement of obesity pharmacotherapy is a major constraint on the obesity market. Third-party payers are reluctant to pay for obesity treatment, and many patients cannot afford the cost of branded therapies on their own. Poor reimbursement of emerging therapies will continue to prevent the obesity market from reaching its full potential."

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