Patent Expiry and Pharmaceutical Market Opportunities at the Nexus of Pricing and Innovation Policy - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 276

Sales for Prozac, Symbyax and Zyprexa

6

5

4

in bn$ 3

2

1

0

Prozac Family

Zyprexa

Symbyax

Fig. 9.6 Sales of Eli Lilly blockbuster neurological medicines as reported in 10 K fi lings

recovered share price and sustained market share in the category with the marketing
and acceptance of new compound branded as Zyprexa (olanzapine). Like Nexium
in the GERD category, Zyprexa was launched before the incumbent Prozac's patent
cliff and eventually grew to twice the volume in sales. Zyprexa is a signifi cant rev-
enue earner for Lilly (Fig. 9.6 ) but is facing a patent cliff in 2011. Additional com-
bination therapy drugs such as olanzapine containing fl uoxetine in the same pill
have been marketed by Lilly since 2004 as Symbyax but have not contributed sig-
nifi cantly to Lilly's category sales.
While this class of drugs will not likely be an OTC product, they could pre-empt
generic entry with a low cost generic of their own (Jain 2010 ; Kamien and Zang
1999 ). This was not done in the case of Prozac and it is not apparent that this was
contemplated proactively before or reactively after the Zyprexa patent cliff was tra-
versed in 2011. Preliminary data on Zyprexa sales in 2012 suggest that Lilly has
already lost 70 % of sales for this drug. 24

24 Data from http://www.drugs.com/stats/zyprexa . Accessed 5 July 2012.