Nivolumab to Lead Lung Cancer Drug Market with Sales of $1.75 Billion by 2022

Tuesday 25 February 2014, Amsterdam

Bristol-Myers Squibb’s (BMS) nivolumab will overtake proven blockbuster competitors to dominate the Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) treatment market following an expected 2015 launch.

According to the company’s latest analysis nivolumab, a first-in-class immunotherapy, will become the overall NSCLC market sales leader by 2022, reaching revenue of $1.75 billion.

Covering the key markets of the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan, China and India, the new report expects BMS’s promising new immunotherapy to eventually outsell current marketed frontrunners Avastin and Tarceva over the forecast period. Leading pipeline drugs such as Afatinib, from Boehringer Ingelheim, and Eli Lilly’s necitumumab – with 2022 revenues forecast at $688m and $384m, respectively – will also be outperformed by nivolumab, states the report.

Brooke Baker, PhD, oncology healthcare analyst, says: “NSCLC is the second most common cancer in both men and women, and patients who are diagnosed with the condition have an extremely poor prognosis, with five-year survival rates limited to approximately 2% in US patients diagnosed at stage four of the disease.

“However, nivolumab’s mechanism of action means it is able to exploit the body’s own immune system and initiate an anti-tumor immune response by targeting PD-1, a biomarker with high expression across many tumor types, therefore giving the drug the potential to be a blockbuster new NSCLC therapy.”

With BMS seeking to position the drug in the second line for all NSCLC patients, it could well fulfil two significant unmet needs within disease management: as a superior second-line therapy and as a treatment for squamous patients. Expected entry of nivolumab in the first-line setting in 2019 will cement the leading position of BMS’s strong asset, states the report.

Considering these advantages, analysts believe that nivolumab will become a key driver behind the growth of the global NSCLC market, which is expecting to rise at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 3.3%, from $5.7 billion in 2012 to $7.9 billion in 2022.

“This level of growth will also result from an increasing number of NSCLC incident cases in the majority of the markets covered by the report, especially in Japan and the emerging markets of China and India,” says Baker.  

However, there are a number of barriers that will prevent the market from growing any further. The expiration of patents for several major drugs will spark a significant increase in generic and biosimilar competition for these branded therapies, severely impacting sales.  

Growth in the EU will also be limited by hurdles in obtaining approval for reimbursement and premium pricing for emerging pipeline agents, while in the US, the adoption of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could generate a new cost-conscious environment which may well affect the free-pricing system.