Over the next twelve months, numerous drugs destined for great commercial success will enter the pharmaceutical market: there will be exactly eleven, according to the Thomson Reuters news agency. Experts have compiled a ranking in which the first place is occupied by nivolumab, Bristol-Myers Squibb's drug for the intravenous treatment of melanoma, which is expected to reach sales of $5.7 billion by 2019. Nivolumab is a Pd-1 immune checkpoint inhibitor antibody and has shown a response rate of 32% in a randomized phase 3 study in patients with unresectable or metastatic melanoma, in whom first-line treatment failed to arrest disease progression.
Approved last December by the FDA, it is currently under review by the EMA. Taking second place in the ranking is alirocumab, developed by Sanofi and Regeneron: it is a monoclonal antibody targeted against the Pcsk9 protein, a substance produced by the liver that interferes with LDL cholesterol receptors. For alirocumab, Thomson Reuters forecasts 4.4 billion in sales, also by 2019.
In third place is a therapeutic combination from Novartis indicated for the treatment of chronic heart failure: the drug contains sacubitril (a neprilysin inhibitor) and valsartan (angiotensin receptor antagonist) and appears destined to reach a turnover of 3, 7 billion dollars. The other eight drugs in the rankings are: the experimental anticancer palbociclib; the combination of ivacaftor and lumacaftor for patients with cystic fibrosis; the combined regimen of the antiviral agents veruprevir, ritonavir, ombitasvir and dasabuvir for the treatment of hepatitis C; evolocumab, a principle belonging to the new class of Pcsk9 anti-cholesterol drugs; Gardasil 9 for the prevention of tumors caused by papilloma viruses; brexpiprazole, to treat schizophrenia, depression and agitation states in patients with Alzheimer's disease; toujeo, a new formulation of insulin glargine and finally Secukinumab, a first-line systemic treatment of psoriasis.
