Lilly, Daiichis Anti-clotting Drug Has Lower Costs Than Plavix
The Lilly-Daiichi drug, Effient, had an average cost savings of $221 per patient over the course of a 15-month study, said David Cohen, director of research at Saint Lukes Mid American Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, in a presentation today at a heart-device conference. The savings figures took into account the cost of hospital care, heart surgeries and other procedures, along with the cost of the drugs themselves, said Cohen, the studys lead investigator.
Effient was approved in the U.S. in July for the prevention of heart attacks and strokes in patients with acute coronary syndrome who are undergoing a procedure, known as angioplasty, to repair or unblock blood vessels. The Lilly-Daiichi drug competes with Plavix, which had sales of $8.2 billion last year for New York-based Bristol-Myers and Paris-based Sanofi.
“We live in a world where there is significant concern about health care costs,” said LeRoy LeNarz, senior medical director of cardiovascular care at Indianapolis-based Lilly, in a telephone interview. “That $221 has a significant impact when you are improving patient outcomes versus the standard of care and reducing costs.”
Larger Study
The cost analysis, presented at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics meeting, was part of a larger, 13,608-patient study, known as Triton, that found that Effient was more effective than Plavix at reducing the number of deaths from heart disease. The Effient patients, however, had more cases than Plavix of excessive bleeding that led to death, according to study results presented in November 2007 at an American Heart Association scientific meeting.
The total costs for heart patients on Effient was $26,067 over 15 months compared with $26,288 for those on Plavix, according to the 6,700-patient study, funded by Lilly and Daiichi Sankyo. Patients who took Effient incurred lower hospital costs and had fewer surgical procedures, such as repeat angioplasties, although drug costs were higher. Effient costs $166 per month compared with $141 for Plavix, the researchers said.
Effient began selling in April in Europe under the alternative spelling “Efient.”
Plavix, which is Bristol-Myers best-selling drug, loses its patent protection in 2011, and is likely to be available in lower-cost generic versions. For purposes of the cost study, Cohen also projected that generic Plavix will cost about $1 a day.
Assuming a $30 monthly cost for the generic version of Plavix, Lilly-Daiichi drugs “higher cost may be justified based on projected gains in long-term survival,” Cohen said.