The world's top 10 block­busters — and what they tell us about R&D trends

In bio­phar­ma, the big R&D quest these days is build­ing new block­busters. And this list of the top 10 block­busters drawn to­geth­er for Na­ture Re­views Drug Dis­cov­ery by Eval­u­atePhar­ma il­lus­trates why.

I’ll note here that this list isn’t quite ac­cu­rate. You should prob­a­bly call it the top 10 block­busters sold by 1 com­pa­ny, as it over­looks part­nered drugs. So En­brel, with $7.1 bil­lion from Am­gen and Pfiz­er, doesn’t make the cut — though it should. There are oth­ers as well. But it still makes for an in­ter­est­ing re­view, es­pe­cial­ly if you want to look at the way these num­bers are in­flu­enc­ing R&D plans.

Most of these drugs got on­to this list and stayed there by fol­low­ing a tried and true path to block­buster cre­ation: push­ing an­nu­al price hikes that were grad­u­al­ly worth bil­lions in new rev­enue. Just look at the top 2 cash cows, Hu­mi­ra and Revlim­id, with close to $30 bil­lion in com­bined sales. Eu­rope blocked the price hike path years ago, and now the US is strug­gling to catch up but has clear­ly made an im­pres­sion on the big play­ers — watch out for those across-the-board price in­creas­es as you look to max­i­mize your oil well, er, drug fran­chise, be­fore time runs out.

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