Risperdal goes generic soon

Drugmakers’ Me-Too Medicines Face Tough Customers:Big Pharma’s pitches for new and improved versions of old drugs aren’t working the magic they used to.

Posted by Scott Hensley

Johnson & Johnson still hopes for better sales of Invega (AP)
New York psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman has heard Johnson & Johnson’s spiel for schizophrenia medicine Invega, a derivative of the company’s blockbuster Risperdal, that was launched last year. And he’s not buying it.

Invega is “basically a me-too drug, and the company hasn’t done the studies that would be required to really distinguish it,” Lieberman, chairman of the psychiatry department at Columbia University’s medical school told Peter Loftus of Dow Jones Newswires.

Dan Carlat, a psychiatrist and a tough critic of Invega, wrote that J&J’s “marketing team apparently missed the fact that the word in the English language that sounds most like “Invega” is “inveigle,” meaning “to entice, lure, or ensnare by flattery or artful talk or inducements.’ ” He asked doctors: “Will you be doing your patients a favor by taking the plunge? Or will you simply be giving them the same wine in a fancier bottle?”

The psychiatrists’ skepticism, Dow Jones reports, is shared broadly by health insurers and points to a rising challenge for drug makers: a tougher market for follow-on drugs. Cheap generics abound to treat a broad assortment of illnesses these days. What’s the point, the critics ask, of paying more for drugs that are at best only slight improvements over tried and true medicines available at bargain prices?

The tougher landscape is bad news for J&J. Risperdal goes generic in the U.S. next month. For the four months ending in April, U.S. sales of Invega were $85 million compared with $810 million for the oral form of Risperdal, according to data from Wolters Kluwer Health.

Following this article in the Wall Street Journal is a lively discussion between (what I call) realists and what I can only assume are investors.