Worldwide Market Growth
Market sizing forecast to 2028
Many of the blockbusters facing patent expiry in the coming years are biologics, some of which have enjoyed remarkably long periods uncontested on the market. So-called patent thickets grown around brands like Enbrel and Humira allowed their developers to amass years of substantial sales growth.
This has helped the biotech category’s dominance grow over the last decade, versus sales of drugs based on conventional chemistry-based technology. Biologics have delivered real leaps forward in disease treatment and management. But the lines of the chart below would not have converged so quickly had these agents’ lifespans followed those of small molecules; the latter tend to experience a shorter patented life and very swift sales erosion once generics have arrived.
It should be noted that figures 3 and 4, showing the biotech and conventional category split, are derived from product sales, not prescriptions. Biologics are typically more expensive than drugs based on conventional chemistry. As such, this revenue-based view of the drugs market will over-emphasise the biotech category’s importance to the sector.
This is not to say that these trends are not real: Evaluate Pharma predicts that sales of biotech-based
products will more than triple to $694bn over the decade ending 2028. The biotech category is expanding, with novel technologies like gene therapies, antibody-drug conjugates and cell therapies becoming available for an ever-growing list of diseases.
The big jump that can been seen in these graphs in 2021 is an artefact of the pandemic and the resulting explosion in sales of vaccines and therapeutic antibodies developed to treat the virus, all of which fall into the biotechnology category.
Evaluate Pharma predicts that sales of biotech-based products will more than triple to $694bn over the decade ending 2028.
