In its opening months, after spinning off as a separate business from Novartis, Sandoz is riding the wave of a strong launch of its biosimilar version of AbbVie’s Humira (adalimumab).
With Hyrimoz leading the way, sales of the company’s biosimilars reached $623 million in the first three months of this year, good for a 21% increase from the first quarter of last year. Meanwhile, Sandoz’s generics sales reached $1.87 billion in the first quarter, a 1% gain from the same period in 2023.
That adds up to 6% growth rate for the company overall. During the period, biosimilar sales represented 25% of the company's total sales, up from 22% a year ago.
Expect the trend to continue as Hyrimoz continues to gain steam and after Sandoz's $170 million purchase of Lucentis biosimilar Cimerli from Coherus BioSciences. In March, Coherus reported Cimerli sales of $52 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 and $125 million for the year. Cimerli was launched in the United States in September of last year.
“This acquisition builds our leading ophthalmology platform in the U.S. and lays an even stronger foundation for future product launches,” Sandoz CEO Richard Saynor said during a quarterly conference call on Tuesday.
As for the launch of Hyrimoz, Sandoz highlighted data from IQVIA that shows its offering is capturing 82% of the biosimilar prescriptions written for adalimumab through the week of April 25.
The surge started on April 1 when pharmacy benefit manager CVS Caremark removed AbbVie’s branded Humira from its national commercial formularies and covered its biosimilar versions. As a result of CVS’s adjustment, analysts from Evercore ISI noted that new prescriptions of Hyrimoz skyrocketed from 640 to 8,300 in the first week of April.
After Sandoz released financial results, analysts from Intron Health highlighted the importance of the company's claim that Hyrimoz has preferred access to 65% of CVS’s commercial business.
The Intron team sees the company’s biosimilar business booming in the next few years, citing future launches of biosimilars to Biogen’s Tysabri, Regeneron and Bayer’s Eylea, Amgen’s Prolia and Johnson & Johnson’s Stelara.
“We expect this division to become a much bigger part of the business and drive significant growth,” Intron wrote. “We expect this to continue to drive re-rating in the Sandoz shares.”
Sandoz, which doesn’t reveal sales for its individual products, stuck to its guidance for 2024, expecting mid-single-digit percentage sales growth.
“At this point, I think it's important that we build credibility as a new company,” Saynor said when asked why the company didn’t provide more clarity on its guidance. “It’s probably prudent to see how the next quarter evolves and look at that going forward.”