Replies to post #57801 on Biotech Values

[RockRat]

xrymd, re ZGEN,

I appreciate your sharing your clinical experience with thrombin here. If I could impose on you a tad more, I'm trying to get a handle on the advantages and disadvantages in handling and administration that the different formulations of the competing products present, and how those might affect uptake in the market. I don't have the hospital experience to do it. You, on the other hand, probably know all this from the top of your head. So a few questions:

Evithrom is thawed from frozen form, typically in an hour. It can be done in 10 minutes at 37C for the 2,000 units and 5,000 units sizes. It's not an option for the 20,000 unit vials. For that size, the minimum thaw time is an hour. I gather Recothrom and Thrombin-JMI are both reconstituted from powder form with saline diluent. I would guess this process is faster, but I do not know.

Who mixes the bovine thrombin? Hospital pharmacist or a med/surg nurse in your unit? Presumably the same person would mix the Recothrom. Who would be thawing the Evithrom? Med/surg nurse, hospital pharmacist, or blood bank tech? Do all hospitals have the equipment to flash thaw at 37C? Is either the thawing process or the reconstitution process onerous enough relative to the other to bug anyone involved?

If there is an advantage in reconstitution speed for any of the products, would it make a difference in any setting (perhaps, for example, in emergency surgeries)? Any chance a speed disadvantage could keep one of the products out of a certain setting? I wouldn't really expect the market to expand due to a speed advantage, because I don't see one versus Thrombin-JMI.

It seems to me that Recothrom could be superior to Thrombin-JMI because of the the oft-discussed immunogenicity and infection issues, as it's apparently equal in ease of use, speed of readiness, storage, etc. And it could be superior to Evithrom due to the infection issue, but I'm not sure about the ease of use or speed of readiness issues.

Would the P&T committees care much about speed or ease of use?

Should you need reference, especially for the new products, here are links to their labels:

Evithrom:

http://www.fda.gov/cber/label/evithromLB.pdf

Recothrom:

http://www.zymogenetics.com/products/documents/RECOTHROM_Prescribing_Info.pdf

Thrombin-JMI:

http://www.kingpharm.com/kingpharm/uploads/pdf_inserts/Thrombin_Web_PI_2007-09.pdf

TIA & Regards, RockRat

[tony111]

Xrymd,

Is KG really cutting's its bovine thrombin price by 30% for multi year contracts? What I heard before was a 10-15% reduction in price.



Kevin DeGeeter, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., said, there were signs that King Pharmaceuticals was aggressively cutting the price of its product. While King Pharmaceuticals charges an average wholesale price of $72 a vial, he said, channel checks showed that King Pharmaceuticals was offering its product for $45 to $50 if clients signed multiyear contracts. Recothrom costs wholesalers $86 a vial.