Patient Access to High-Cost Therapies for CML in China: How Are Payers and Physicians Shaping This Crowded and Changing Market? | Physician & Payer Forum | China | 2014
Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in China presents a huge challenge for healthcare providers but is a considerable opportunity for drug manufacturers. The launch of Novartis’s Glivec (imatinib), an ABL kinase inhibitor, revolutionized CML treatment and has become the first-line gold-standard therapy for CML. Follow-on therapies include Novartis’s Tasigna (nilotinib) and Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Sprycel (dasatinib), which are approved as second- or third-line therapy. Two generic versions of Glivec from domestic companies (Jiangsu Chia Tai Tianqing and Jiangsu Hansoh) launched in China in 2013, and a Sprycel generic version (Jiangsu Chia Tai Tianqing) was also approved in 2013. In addition to these recently launched products, a range of future market entrants, including Pfizer’s Bosulif (bosutinib) and Jiangsu Hansoh’s flumatinib, will start to crowd the CML market. This report examines the prescribing barriers that high-cost targeted therapies for CML will face, as well as strategies to overcome these obstacles. We explore physician and payer attitudes and behaviors concerning currently marketed brands versus newly launched generics and also explore their expectations for emerging therapies.
