First place fin­ish: Eli Lil­ly just moved to fran­chise leader with their sec­ond mi­graine drug OK in 1 year

In a rare twist for Eli Lil­ly’s his­tor­i­cal­ly slow-mov­ing R&D group, the phar­ma gi­ant has seized brag­ging rights to a first-in-class new drug ap­proval. And all signs point to an ag­gres­sive mar­ket­ing fol­lowup as they look to out­class some ma­jor fran­chise ri­vals hob­bled by in­ter­nal dis­sen­sion.

The FDA came through with an OK for las­mid­i­tan on Fri­day evening, brand­ing it as Reyvow and lin­ing it up — once a sub­stance clas­si­fi­ca­tion comes through from the DEA — for a ma­jor mar­ket re­lease. The oral drug binds to 5-HT1F re­cep­tors and is de­signed to stop an acute mi­graine af­ter it starts. That makes it a com­ple­men­tary ther­a­py to their CGRP drug Em­gal­i­ty, which has a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on pre­vent­ing at­tacks.

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