On February 23rd, Interface News learned that multinational pharmaceutical company (MNC), Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), has granted the sales rights of its star product, Navolizumab (commonly known as O-drug), to domestic pharmaceutical company Zaiding Pharmaceutical in some provinces of Greater China, including 10 provinces including Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Hebei, and Shanxi.
On the same day, Zaiding Pharmaceutical confirmed the aforementioned news to Interface News and stated that the two products that have reached strategic cooperation with BMS this time are Oudiwo and Yiwo. The company hopes that this cooperation can better benefit more Chinese patients with these two innovative drugs. As of the time of publication, there has been no response from the BMS side.
Among them, Odyvos, also known as O drug, is the world's first PD-1 product. Yiwo is a CTLA-4 monoclonal antibody (Yervoy, commonly known as Y drug). These two drugs are heavyweight products of BMS. In 2020, the combination therapy of O and Y drugs was approved for first-line treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), opening up dual immunotherapy on this major indication. According to the Dingxiangyuan Insight database, BMS achieved sales of $9 billion and $2.2 billion in O and Y drugs respectively for the entire year of 2023.
In fact, O-drug is the world's first PD-1, which was approved in Japan and the United States in 2014, and entered the Chinese market in 2018. It was also in 2018 that the sales of O drug were surpassed by K drug, a similar product of MSD. In 2023, the latter has replaced Abbott's Schumacher as the new drug king, with annual sales reaching $25 billion.
At the same time, it is the aforementioned two explosive products that have sparked a wave of following up on PD-1 drugs in China. Based on the efficacy of this type of drug and the properties of broad-spectrum anti-cancer drugs, the industry had predicted that PD-1 drugs would have a market of billions in China.
Since 2018, domestically produced PD-1 products from Junshi, Xinda, Hengrui, and Baekje have been successively approved. At present, there are over 15 PD - (L) 1 products in China. In June 2023, Jiahe Biotech's Genizumab also became the first PD-1 rejected in China. Meanwhile, with the implementation of industry policies such as medical insurance fee control and national negotiations, the once trillion dollar market has greatly shrunk.
At present, the four major domestically produced PD-1 drugs mentioned above have all entered medical insurance, with an annual treatment cost of less than 50000 yuan. However, imported drugs such as O and K have never been included in the national medical insurance, with an annual treatment cost of around 100000 yuan. They are also bound to be divided among domestic drugs in the domestic market.
Therefore, BMS may transfer the sales rights of the aforementioned 10 provinces to domestic pharmaceutical companies for sales efficiency considerations. Interface News once analyzed that on the one hand, local pharmaceutical companies may have more advantages in lower tier markets, such as having more branches in non core markets; On the other hand, from the perspective of labor costs, foreign companies have higher base salaries compared to local pharmaceutical companies. Therefore, cooperation between foreign and local enterprises will objectively save a considerable amount of labor costs. Once the sales rights of the product are delegated, foreign companies only need to consider sales targets and profit sharing issues. In addition, BMS has handed over the sales rights to Zaiding in the vast market, and the core market remains the responsibility of BMS itself.
In fact, in recent years, it is not uncommon for MNC to hand over its products to local pharmaceutical companies for sales. In the second half of 2023, Sanofi will hand over several products to Shanghai Pharmaceutical Group, Pfizer will hand over the Pei'er vaccine to Shanghai Pharmaceutical Science Park for trading, and GlaxoSmithKline will hand over the herpes zoster vaccine to Zhifei Biotechnology.
However, there have been opposite cases on PD-1. Previously, Junshi Biotechnology had collaborated with AstraZeneca to sell its PD-1 Treprizumab, but the collaboration ended within less than a year.
Meanwhile, this is not the first time that there has been a connection between Zaiding Pharmaceutical and BMS. Previously, Zaiding imported the ROS1/NTRK inhibitor Repotrecinib from Turning Point in July 2020, and the muscarinic antipsychotic drug KarXT from Karuna in November 2021 for its rights in the Greater China region. In 2022, BMS acquired Turning Point and announced the acquisition of Karuna in December 2023.
For this cooperation, it can also be seen as a further extension of its license in (authorized introduction) model, which involves introducing products from overseas and expanding to directly represent and sell products to pharmaceutical companies with mature teams in China. Whether this trend will further expand its value in the future remains to be seen.
Currently, Zhongding Pharmaceutical has a total of 5 products on the market. In the first three quarters of 2023, the company's revenue was 1.442 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 31.78%, and the net profit attributable to the parent company was a loss of 1.717 billion yuan.