J&J faces its second rival Remicade knockoff as FDA gives Merck a shot at a $7B franchise
The FDA has approved a new knockoff of J&J’s top earning drug Remicade, which may finally start to shift the market dynamics toward greater competition with lower prices.
This new one is dubbed Renflexis and comes from Samsung Bioepis, one of the big players in the biosimilars field. And it arrives in the US market close to a year after the EMA approved it for Europe.
J&J’s Remicade earned close to $7 billion last year, making this by far its biggest drug in the portfolio. And as J&J noted a few days ago during its Q1 call with analysts, the pharma giant has yet to feel much of an impact from the first Remicade biosimilar from Pfizer, Inflectra (infliximab-dyyb), which was developed by Celltrion and then bagged by the pharma giant in its acquisition of Hospira. That was approved last fall.
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