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J&J: We're Creaming Medivation, Boehringer, Bristol And Pfizer

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I'm at Johnson & Johnson's Pharmaceutical Business Review today. Most of the day is dedicated to geeky drug R&D stuff, but Joaquin Duato started of the morning with a run-down of how J&J's pharmaceutical division is doing in terms of cold, hard sales. Note that these are J&J's slides and data, presented on the company's home turf in New Brunswick.

Two J&J drugs of interest:

  • Zytiga, a pill for prostate cancer that J&J acquired before it was approved, that is competing with Xtandi, a competing pill from Medivation. Duato said that two-thirds of Xtandi use has been in patients who already took Zytiga, and that a recent poll of doctors predicted Zytiga would remain the top seller in 2016.
  • Xarelto, a new blood thinner to replace warfarin in preventing strokes among patients with atrial fibrillation, a heart rhythm disorder. It is competing with Pradaxa, from Boehringer Ingelheim, and Eliquis, from Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Here are the relevant slides, showing how many times these drugs were prescribed compared to their competitors:

Benjamin Davies, an Assistant Professor of Urology at the University of Pittsburgh, doesn't buy that Zytiga sales will hold up. He tweets:

And on Xarelto: