Lantus is the best-selling diabetes drug in the world right now, hitting $6.674 billion last year. It is also the top-selling drug for Sanofi ($SNY). But the French drugmaker is not letting all of that go to its head. With competition fierce in the diabetes category, Sanofi is pushing its franchise in multiple directions, issuing new devices, new drugs and new markets to secure its position.
Sanofi caught a huge break this year when the FDA sidelined Tresiba, a new kind of long-lasting insulin that looked like it had the potential to give Lantus a run for its money. The agency asked for further study of its heart risks, a request developer Novo Nordisk ($NVO) says will keep Tresiba off the U.S. market until at least 2018. In the interim, Sanofi is hoping for approval of a new and improved formulation of Lantus to distance itself from competitors. This month, it will unveil results of a study of the formulation, which Reuters says is expected to show it lasts longer and leads to fewer episodes of low blood sugar, one of the selling points of Novo's Tresiba.
There are more than 370 million people globally with diabetes, and Sanofi is also pushing hard into emerging markets like China to tap their need for treatment and for sales of its other drugs. It is opening four plants in China this year, has started on a facility in Vietnam and just this week started commercial production at an insulin pen plant in Russia. Investors seem to be buying Sanofi's strategy; its shares are outperforming competitors.
But other companies see the same statistics and are looking for ways to capture their own growing share of the market. Eli Lilly ($LLY) has a new diabetes drug under development that is seen as a potential Lantus competitor, and it is working on a biosimilar of Lantus which could prove popular in those same emerging markets Sanofi is chasing. Valentina Gburcik, an analyst with GlobalData, told Reuters, "Since Eli Lilly is an established diabetes player, that's quite a threat."
- read the Reuters story
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