This year’s top 100 brands list from consultancy Clarivate incudes no less than 21 biopharma products as COVID vaccines and digital health innovations take center stage.
Alongside wireless earbuds Honor Choice and social media craze TikTok, Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID vaccine Comirnaty has “burst onto the global scene and become a household name in a remarkably short span of time,” Clarivate’s report explains.
Novavax’s non-mRNA COVID vaccine Nuvaxovid is in there, too, having just recently nabbed an FDA authorization after an earlier green light in Europe.
And while COVID vaccines are the standouts, many other biopharma products make an appearance on the list. For instance, Roche’s Accu-chek Smartguide, a digital device for checking blood sugar levels at home, is on there, as well as another offering from Roche, a smartphone test for multiple sclerosis patients.
There's also Bayer’s Calantic—a new platform delivering access to digital apps, including AI programs, specific for medical imaging—and the psoriasis drug Bimzelx from UCB.
The top 100 brands, which aren’t ranked, come from Clarivate’s assessment of new brands with trademark protections filed predominantly in 2020-21.
“Instead of trying to assess their value to consumers, we measured the number of trademark applications that have been filed, where they have been protected and how many different products/services the brands cover,” Robert Reading, Clarivate head of content strategy, said in an interview.
“This gives a good indication of the level of investment that has been put into launching the new brand and the size of the market they are looking to cover," Reading said. "By looking at data and creating repeatable metrics, we aim to avoid making subjective assessments.”
Clarivate hasn’t checked public sentiment for these brands. For a category like COVID-19 vaccines, it looks purely at trademark data. But as Reading noted, “The COVID-19 vaccine names have been the subject of a very high level of brand investment: A large number of trademark applications in a short period of time in a large number of countries.”
The pharmaceutical sector has always invested strongly in brands, but often these are relatively niche products that are only relevant to a small proportion of the population. This has now changed.
“The global pandemic made the public more aware of some specific areas of pharma work—particularly vaccines,” said Reading. “In future years, it may be that treatments for COVID-19 are the next wave of high-profile pharma brand names,” which could include the two new treatments out from Pfizer and Merck/Ridgeback in Paxlovid and molnupiravir, respectively.