Generic competition and a major drop in sales of its diabetes drug Avandia has led to GlaxoSmithKline posting a 9% decline in operating profits to £2.05 billion for the first quarter.
Turnover slipped 3% to £5.67 billion, with pharmaceutical sales decreasing 4% to £4.80 million. The most significant decline was a 56% drop in revenues, to £191 million, for Avandia (rosiglitazone) which has suffered ever since a meta-analysis that was published last May by the New England Journal of Medicine alleged a link between the drug and the risk of cardiovascular disease, claims which have not died away.
Chief executive Jean-Pierre Garnier acknowledged on a conference call that the product “lost many users last year” but in the last six to eight weeks “we have seen stability in the number of prescriptions written for Avandia”. He went on to say that it is too early to say whether “we're going to be able to turn around the Avandia franchise and recoup the patients we lost" but claimed that "so far at least we have stopped the bleeding”.
Other drugs were savaged by generic competition, notably Zofran (ondansetron), GSK’s nausea treatment for patients undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, which fell 69% to £29 million, the allergy drug Flixonase/Flonase (fluticasone), down 33% to £46 million and the antidepressant Wellbutrin (bupropion), which slipped 3% to £126 million. Sales of the heart disease drug Coreg (carvedilol) sank 77% to £48 million.
Source: PharmaTimes
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