Monsanto's Celebrex Sales Seen Hitting $1 Billion In 1st Year
By Thomas Burton, Staff Reporter
02/22/99
Dow Jones Business News
CHICAGO -(Dow Jones)- A leading health-care analyst told Dow Jones that, based on the latest sales numbers, it now is "conservative" to predict that the Monsanto Co. arthritis-pain drug Celebrex will hit $1 billion in sales in its first year on the market.
Meanwhile, those sales figures for Celebrex 's fifth week on the market show that it is closing in on the sales of impotence medication Viagra at a comparable time.
Since Viagra is the No. 1-selling recent drug in achieving early sales, this means that Celebrex could easily become the all-time early top-seller among recent drugs, said analyst Hemant K. Shah.
"At this point, it is conservative to say Celebrex will be a billion-dollar drug in its first year," said Shah, who in January told The Wall Street Journal that the drug's first-year sales could reach the $1 billion mark.
NDC Health Information Services, which supplies marketing data to the pharmaceutical industry, told Dow Jones that Celebrex sales for the fifth week of marketing, ended Sunday Feb. 21, hit 155,000 prescriptions. Viagra achieved 310,000 prescriptions at the same point in its marketing history. But NDC's senior vice president, Shel Silverberg, told Dow Jones that the fifth week was the highest single week that Viagra achieved.
And Celebrex is running at about five times the early sales of the cholesterol-medication Lipitor, which was No. 2 among recent new pharmaceutical products until Celebrex came along. Lipitor hit about 30,000 prescriptions during its fifth marketing week, in 1997, according to Silverberg.
Lipitor is projected to be a $3 billion drug this year.
Monsanto (MTC) co-markets Celebrex with Pfizer Inc. (PFE), the maker of Viagra and also the co-marketer of Warner-Lambert Co.'s (WLA) Lipitor.
The joint marketing of Celebrex truly starts only this week, with sales just beginning. Yet without such "detailing" visits to doctors, Celebrex already has grabbed about 16% of the pain-treatment market, Shah said.
Celebrex is the forerunner of a new class of arthritis drugs known as Cox-2 inhibitors. They act against an enzyme called cyclooxygenase-2, or Cox-2 for short. The Cox-2 drugs have special promise, in the view of many rheumatologists and internists, because clinical data suggest that these medications may not cause damage to patients' gastrointestinal tracts, as current drugs do. The next Cox-2 drug likely to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration is Merck & Co.'s (MRK) Vioxx.
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