New Chemical Entities Round-Up For 1994

Marketletter has compiled a listing of 53 New Chemical Entities launched or approved in their first markets in 1994, which includes agents with significant sales potential and some innovative approaches to important diseases, as well as several new products which are expected to become significant competitors to established drugs.

At the end of the year, there was good news for the biotechnology industry when Centocor secured approval in the USA and Europe for ReoPro (abciximab), its monoclonal antibody treatment for preventing abrupt vascular closure after angioplasty. ReoPro acts via a novel mode of action, the inhibition of glycoprotein IIb/IIIa, which prevents platelet aggregation. The approval was a lift for an industry which suffered a number of high-profile disappointments in 1994, and was also a vindication of the rationale of using monoclonal antibodies as therapeutics.

Another advance in biotechnology was the launch of a recombinant version of glucocerebrosidase, Genzyme's Cerezyme (imiglucerase), for the treatment of patients with Gaucher's disease. Its availability overcomes problems with supply of the company's older placenta-derived version, which has the distinction of being the most expensive pharmaceutical in the world at around $150,000 per patient for a year's treatment. Genzyme says it has no plans to cut the price of the recombinant version of glucocerebrosidase at the moment, because of the complexity and expense of its manufacture.