Biopharmas to outpace conventional drugs - Avecia

21 November 2006 13:49  [Source: ICIS news]

BERLIN (ICIS news)--Biopharmaceuticals will continue to outpace conventional pharma drugs in terms of growth and new approvals in the next few years, a senior industry official said on Tuesday.

Stephen Taylor, vice president of Avecia Biologics, said that half of all new drug approvals would be biotech-based by 2009 as biopharma drugs were generally enjoying high success rates as they move through clinical trials.

Speaking at the ICIS 13^th fine chemicals conference, he said that the number of new biological entities was expected to climb to 20-30/year between 2009-2013 from just under the 10-year period 1996-2005 based on the numbers in development and the clinical success rates from 2003.

Biopharma sales growth has been 15% annually over the period 1998-2009 compared with pharma growth at 10% a year.

This rise in biopharma drugs offers huge opportunities in process development and manufacture for Avecia and similar contract manufacturing companies, he said.

Most of the new biopharma drugs will be monoclonal antibodies (Mabs) and by 2009 42% of all biopharma drugs will be Mabs, he said.

But there were still plenty of opportunities with smaller scale biopharma products in low volume, high value niche areas, he added.

Mabs will require large scale, dedicated manufacturing facilities, largely built by the drug majors, such as recent multi-hundred million dollar projects by Amgen ($1bn), Genentech ($600m), Wyeth ($1.8bn) and Genzyme (540m), while the niche products will require smart, flexible facilities for development and manufacture.

By: John Baker
+44 20 8652 3214

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