Sanofi rules out Toujeo discount in diabetes
pharmafile | April 14, 2015 | News story | Sales and Marketing | 100 U/mL, Boehringer, Lantus, insulin glargine [rDNA origin] injection, lilly, toujeo
Sanofi has revealed that it will not discount its new insulin Toujeo more than its current blockbuster Lantus, despite lacking other selling points for the drug.
Lantus (insulin glargine [rDNA origin] injection, 100 U/mL) is the top-selling insulin in the world and Sanofi’s best-selling product, bringing in sales of $6.72 billion last year, but it lost its patents in February.
The French firm is hoping that Toujeo (insulin glargine [rDNA origin] injection, 300 U/mL) will be able to replace it, and will want to try and convert patients from Lantus to its successor as quickly as possible.
However, although data has suggested that Toujeo leads to fewer drops in blood sugar at night than Lantus, Sanofi is unable to market it using this claim in the US as the FDA did not include it in the drug’s label – and the company has now also ruled out using a discount as an alternative selling point.
“There is no reason to give higher rebates,” Pierre Chancel, head of Sanofi’s diabetes business, tells Bloomberg. “Toujeo is an improvement on something that is already great. We don’t necessarily need to compare it to Lantus.”
But the firm will soon be facing competition from Eli Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim – who saw their Lantus biosimilar approved in the EU last year – and diabetes specialist Novo Nordisk –whose Tresbia (insulin degludec), a potential competitor to Toujeo, was recently resubmitted for FDA approval.
Sanofi is looking to inhalable insulin Afrezza (insulin human) as another potential new blockbuster, after acquiring the rights to the drug from manufacturer MannKind in a $925 million deal.
However, the treatment costs more than twice the price of Apidra (insulin glulisine), the company’s equivalent injectable insulin, and industry analysts Thomson Reuters Cortellis only predict Afrezza to generate around $182 million a year by 2019.
The firm says that it will initially market Toujeo to newly-diagnosed diabetics, which only represents around 3% of the market in the US. The drug is expected to be available in the US in the second quarter of 2015.
George Underwood
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