The obesity drug market will increase more than six-fold over the next decade, increasing from $420 million in 2010 to $2.6 billion in 2020 in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and Japan.
Decision Resources, a research and advisory firm for pharmaceutical and health care issues, found market growth will be driven by the rapid uptake of novel emerging agents and the high prevalence of obesity.
The findings from the Pharmacor topic entitled Obesity reveal that a significant unmet need remains for agents that can induce satisfactory weight loss. Physicians and patients alike consider the weight-loss efficacy of the current market leaders—Roche's Xenical, GlaxoSmithKline's OTC Alli and the generic agent, phentermine—to be unsatisfactory. However, the 2012 launch of Vivus's Qnexa will help fulfill the need for more efficacious agents, owing to its weight-loss efficacy which is superior to currently available options, and this will result in blockbuster sales for this agent.
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The findings also reveal that, based on new safety concerns, key opinion leaders perceive Arena/Eisai's Lorqess to have a suboptimal risk to benefit ratio—as a result, Decision Resources no longer forecasts a launch for this agent. As demonstrated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's rejection of Lorqess and Orexigen Therapeutics/Takeda's Contrave, the safety threshold for new obesity agents remains extremely high.
"Agents that can demonstrate improvements in obesity-related disease, as well as induce adequate weight loss, will have a greater chance of approval," said Decision Resources Analyst Kate Sullivan. "For this reason, we expect Novo Nordisk's type 2 diabetes agent, Victoza, will become a key obesity therapy over the next ten years, and will gain blockbuster sales in obesity over and above what it will achieve in type 2 diabetes."
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