The top 10 block­buster drugs in the late-stage pipeline — Eval­u­ate adds 6 new ther­a­pies to heavy-hit­ter list

Ver­tex comes in for a sub­stan­tial amount of crit­i­cism for its no-holds-barred tac­ti­cal ap­proach to­ward wrest­ing the price it wants for its com­mer­cial drugs in Eu­rope. But the flip side of that coin is a high­ly ad­mired R&D and com­mer­cial op­er­a­tion that reg­u­lar­ly wins ku­dos from an­a­lysts for their abil­i­ty to en­gi­neer greater cash flow from the break­through drugs they cre­ate.

Both as­pects need­ed for suc­cess in this busi­ness are on dis­play in the pro­gram back­ing Ver­tex’s triple for cys­tic fi­bro­sis. VX-659/VX-445 + Teza­caftor + Iva­caftor — it’s been whit­tled down to 445 now — was sin­gled out by Eval­u­ate Phar­ma as the late-stage ther­a­py most like­ly to win the crown for drug sales in 5 years, with a pro­ject­ed peak rev­enue fore­cast of $4.3 bil­lion.

The lat­est an­nu­al list, which you can see here in their lat­est world pre­view, in­cludes a ros­ter of some of the most close­ly watched de­vel­op­ment pro­grams in bio­phar­ma. And Eval­u­ate has added 6 must-watch ex­per­i­men­tal drugs to the top 10 as drugs fail or go on to a first ap­proval. With apolo­gies to the list mak­er, I re­vamped this to rank the top 10 by pro­ject­ed 2024 sales, in­stead of Eval­u­ate’s net present val­ue rank­ings.

It’s how we roll at End­points News.

Here is a quick sum­ma­ry of the rest of the top 10:

Sign up to read this article for free.

Get free access to a limited number of articles, plus choose newsletters to get straight to your inbox.

SIGN UP LOG IN BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER