If your brand is approaching its loss of exclusivity you maybe starting to think about the launch of generics. You’ll be concerned with how long you can maintain margin and retain he brand. Is it worth brand equalising, and if so for how long? In these situations, it’s very useful to have price analogues to help you forecast, or at least make some intelligent guesses about what market prices will be like in the months and years after loss of exclusivity.
However, as we saw in our last special report, you cannot simply choose products from the same therapeutic category and expect them to be behave in the same way. You’ll have to think like a generic manufacturer, and concentrate on value and complexity. The key thing is what the brand was worth at the loss of exclusivity. The product we chose to evaluate was Tovias (Fesoterodine) and we saw that choosing analogues from the same therapeutic category (drugs for urinary frequency, enuresis and incontinence) did not give us similar price decay rates for products in the same therapeutic category.
Tovias had a market value in England of about £5.5 million pounds a year when it lost exclusivity in May 2022. Therefore, we chose products with a similar market value when they lost exclusivity. One of these was Strattera (Atomoxetine) which lost its exclusivity in May 2019 with a market evaluation of about £7 million.
This gives us a fairly similar price decay rate to Tovias and is shown in the graph. Both Fesoterodine and Atomoxetine saw the prices fall at similar rates for the first 50 months. However, in the last few months the price of Fesoterodine has been rising, and looks as if it may follow a similar price hike curve to Atomoxetine, but there are no guarantees.
Therefore, using market value it is possible to make some predictions about product prices post LOE, but other factors are at play, such as the number of licenses and reimbursement changes.