Initial Sales Surge for Monsanto Arthritis Drug
By Thomas M. Burton and Robert Langreth
01/27/99
The Wall Street Journal
Monsanto Co.'s Celebrex, the first of a new class of arthritis-pain medications, is off to one of the fastest sales starts of any pharmaceutical product.
In its first week of sales, Celebrex generated 9,923 prescriptions nationwide, more than twice the 4,043 first-week prescriptions of Warner-Lambert Co.'s blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor when it entered the market in early 1997. Among recently launched drugs, Lipitor was second in early sales only to the impotence drug Viagra , whose first-week numbers still hold the record by a large margin, although its sales tailed off amid safety concerns.
Celebrex's takeoff is all the more impressive given that Monsanto and its comarketing partner, Pfizer Inc., have barely begun their sales visits to doctors. Moreover, Celebrex isn't yet available at all U.S. drugstores.
"The numbers are mind-boggling," said drug-industry analyst Hemant K. Shah. "If the growth keeps up, Celebrex could reach $1 billion in sales in the first year." The prescription data were assembled by market-survey company NDC Health Information Services.
There is a common denominator to Celebrex, Lipitor and Viagra : Pfizer makes Viagra and co-marketed Lipitor as well as Celebrex. Pfizer has a reputation among doctors and on Wall Street as arguably the most potent of all pharmaceutical marketing forces.
Celebrex is entering the market at a time when many sufferers of arthritis pain and inflammation aren't happy with current drugs, which in many patients cause minor stomach problems and, in a small percentage of patients, bleeding ulcers. So there has been a pent-up demand for new arthritis-pain drugs, and the question is whether this demand will continue. That may well depend on whether the drug fulfills its early promise of alleviating pain while avoiding bleeding ulcers.
Michael Schiff, a rheumatologist at the Denver Arthritis Clinic who helped test Celebrex, said his clinic has been swamped with 150 calls from patients who want to try the drug. He has resorted to giving a lecture to his receptionists explaining the Celebrex trial results.
Just in the past few days he and his colleagues have switched about 70 arthritis patients to the drug, including many who were on Tylenol because they had trouble tolerating anti-inflammatory drugs such as prescription-strength ibuprofen. "We'll eventually have hundreds of people" on Celebrex, said Dr. Schiff, or a competing drug from Merck & Co. that is likely to win marketing approval in a few months.
"This is going to be very widely used, because there are many patients in pain" with older drugs, said Brian Golden, a rheumatologist at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York. He cautioned that some patients seem to have inflated expectations that Celebrex will be much more effective than older drugs, when actually the main benefit is improved safety.
Even though government regulators, being conservative, won't yet allow Monsanto to claim that Celebrex doesn't cause ulcers, doctors are convinced it is better than older drugs. "The reality is this is a safer drug," said Lee Simon, a Harvard Medical School rheumatologist. Recent debates as to whether Celebrex's safety advantage has been completely proved are "arcane regulatory discussions . . . and don't have anything to do with the real world," he said.
Leroy Griffing, chairman of rheumatology at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., said he is "prescribing Celebrex cautiously." He added that "the studies of the drug are all short term," while many patients need a drug for many years. Users of the existing drugs often experienced no difficulty until after they had been taking them for months dor years.
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