by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | June 17, 2016
From the June 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Radiotherapeutics
“I think it’s really exciting because now [the industry has] been talking about theranostics,” says SNMMI’s Lapi. “We can actually start to see this come forward, where we’ve got these compounds that target and report on the expression of a certain receptor that’s in cancer, and then compounds that can target for targeted therapy.”
Following up on this is the use of Lutetium- 177, which is a radiotherapeutic that can be a substitute label to the same Gallium-68 ligand. It creates a therapeutic dose for the tumor and may improve patient outcomes. “Theranostics, using radiopharmaceuticals that allow diagnostic imaging and the same for therapeutics, should provide a variety of radionuclide candidates to the market space,” says United Pharmacy Partners’ Witkowski.
Selling technology
Cancer drugs usually work by immunology, but radiotherapeutics have a much different approach. These drugs produce radiation sources close to the cells and work effectively for certain diseases including non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and blood-borne diseases.
The market is splintered because the commercial base isn’t big enough any longer for the larger companies to make useful investments, says Marvin Burns, president of Bio-Tech Systems, a market research company for the health care industry. At first, the major companies were involved because the drugs were expensive to produce, but they are now selling their products to small specialty pharmacies. “It’s really expanding now as smaller specialty companies are able to get into the field,” says Burns. “Big companies are selling technology to small companies that are [better] positioned to sell the products, and since you don’t need giant biotech [companies] to sell radiotherapeutics.”
Bayer’s Xofigo was introduced about three years ago to treat bone metastases. The radiotherapeutic is injected in the patient’s bone and produces intense energy that kills cancer cells and limits damage to nearby healthy cells. The average price of a yearly supply of Xofigo is about $60,000 per patient. The average price of a year’s supply of conventional cancer drugs is estimated to exceed $100,000, according to the Mayo Clinic.
“[Xofigo] can be viewed as an expensive drug, but it is in the same magnitude compared to some of the novel [chemotherapy drugs],” says Paul-Emmanuel Goethals, co-founder of MEDraysintell, a market research company for radiation health care. Radiotherapeutics made up about 10 percent of the total nuclear medicine market in 2015, and it was largely driven by the success of Xofigo. Goethals expects that radiotherapeutics will represent about 50 percent of the nuclear medicine market by 2030.
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