Obesity Pill Upstart Orexigen Therapeutics Gaining on Rivals
Here comes Orexigen Therapeutics, winning big-time market share from obesity pill rivals Vivus and Arena Pharmaceuticals.
The chart and graph above were tweeted out this morning by professional money manager @zbiotech, who tracks new prescriptions of obesity pills using data generated by Symphony Health.
For the week ended Dec. 5 (the last week of data available), Orexigen's Contrave captured 28% of new prescriptions. Contrave's been commercially available for eight weeks and already had market share for new prescriptions equal to Vivus' Qsymia.
In that same time span, NRx market share for Arena Pharma's Belviq has dropped from 60% to 44%.
Why is Orexigen's Contrave launch outperforming its obesity pill rivals? Give substantial credit to Orexigen's marketing partner, the Japanese drug maker Takeda:
Selling weight-loss pills to fat Americans is clearly more difficult than Vivus and Arena envisioned. Orexigen will face the same challenges, but of the three companies, it has the best marketing partner in Takeda because of its metabolic drug expertise. Takeda's diabetes drug Actos is a blockbuster, so expect the company to apply that know-how to selling Contrave. If approved, Takeda is going to launch Contrave with 900 sales reps, which is way more than Vivus and Eisai (Arena's marketing partner) deploy.
Orexigen also has the advantage of having the only obesity drug with clinical trial data ruling out an increased risk of heart-related side effects. Interim, top-line results from the Contrave "LIGHT" cardiovascular safety study were announced last fall. Data from the heart-safety study are unlikely to be included in the Contrave FDA label just yet in order to allow the study to continue to the end. Still, Takeda sales reps might just find a way to make sure doctors know that the interim analysis of the LIGHT study was positive.
Investors are taking notice.
