Zyprexa decline hits Lilly
pharmafile | April 26, 2013 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Q1, lilly, zyprexa
Loss of exclusivity on Lilly’s blockbuster antipsychotic Zyprexa in 2011 continued to hit the company hard in the first quarter of this year, with overall revenues $5.6 billion – exactly the same as for the similar period in 2012.
Zyprexa, which used to bring in $5 billion a year on its own, had sales of just $248 million in Q1 – down 49% from Q1 2012.
Lilly has long said life without Zyprexa will be hard and so it is proving, casting a long shadow over the company’s financial performance. US sales of the drug went into freefall, dropping 84% to $32 million.
Overall, Lilly’s operating profit in the first quarter of 2013 was $1.4 billion, an increase of 3% compared to the first quarter of 2012.
Lilly’s top-seller, the antidepressant Cymbalta, did well in Q1 with a 19% increase in sales to $1.3 billion – but it will lose patent protection in the US at the end of 2013.
The vast majority of its sales – just over $1 billion – were in the US, up 23 per cent. Other big sellers included diabetes brand Humalog, up 7% worldwide to $632 million, although it too is facing up to loss of exclusivity in the next few years.
Cancer brand Alimta saw a 2% increase in sales to $616.8 million, while erectile dysfunction treatment Cialis was up 11% to $515 million.
Lilly chief executive John Lechleiter declared that the results were ‘solid’ despite ‘numerous headwinds’ including Zyprexa’s decline and a weaker Japanese yen.
He insisted that cost controls had remained tight over the quarter and pointed to as many as five US regulatory submissions that the company intends to make this year.
The first two of these will be investigational sodium glucose co-transporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitor empagliflozin, to treat type II diabetes, which is being developed with Boehringer Ingelheim and is also being reviewed in Europe.
The second is ramucirumab as monotherapy treatment in second-line gastric cancer, which has received fast track designation from the FDA.
R&D expenses were up 17% to $1.3 billion – nearly a quarter of total revenue – but $90 million of this was in empagliflozin milestone payments to Boehringer.
Another $60 million in costs was accrued from the abandonment of the company’s rheumatoid arthritis programme for tabalumab due to lack of efficacy – although the compound’s Phase III programme for systemic lupus erythematosus is still going ahead.
The company says it will still make revenues of between $22.6 billion and $23.4 billion this year, and expects ‘significant revenue growth’ in emerging markets, particularly China.
Adam Hill
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