PharmaEssentia Corp (藥華醫藥) on Friday reported NT$132.07 million (US$4.57 million) in revenue for last month, its highest monthly figure and 301.32 percent higher than one year earlier, thanks to strong sales in the US of its drug Ropeginterferon alfa-2b, also called Ropeg.
Ropeg, sold in the US as Besremi, is a treatment for a rare type of blood cancer, polycythemia vera. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in November last year granted PharmaEssentia marketing approval for the drug.
“Sales of the drug in the US are better than expected,” PharmaEssentia said in a statement. “The number of doctors that prescribed Ropeg, the number of patients that took the drug and the insurance coverage of the drug are all higher than our previous estimates.”
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More than 100 medical centers or institutions in the US prescribe Ropeg for their patients, it added.
US sales of the drug contributed more than NT$100 million in revenue last month, accounting for about 80 percent of the company’s total revenue and becoming an important source of its sales in addition to Europe.
PharmaEssentia’s cumulative revenue grew 157.73 percent year-on-year to NT$251.74 million in the first quarter, it said.
The company said it is upbeat for the second quarter, and is considering expanding production capacity to meet rising demand in the US.
Last year, PharmaEssentia reported a net loss of NT$2.81 billion, as marketing fees and research and development expenditures rose from one year earlier. That translated into losses per share of NT$10.8, company data showed.
Separately, SynCore Biotechnology Co Ltd (杏國新藥) on Thursday said the US FDA approved the company’s application to conduct a new phase 3 clinical trial of its pancreatic cancer drug SB05PC.
The company’s previous phase 3 trial failed to show a statistically significant change in the overall survival rates of people in the experimental and control groups.
SynCore said in a statement that after studying data collected in the previous trial, it found that SB05PC should be able to effectively improve a patients’ survival rate “under specific conditions.”
The company said it redesigned the protocol of the new phase 3 trial, which would target patients who have metastatic pancreatic cancer that was resistant to the chemotherapy regimen of FOLFIRINOX — which consists of the drugs folinic acid, fluorouracil, irinotecan and oxaliplatin.
It expects the new drug to help lengthen patients’ lives by as much as 13.7 months, it said.
Its previous test showed that the median survival time for the 108 participants treated with SB05PC was 226 days, while that of the 100 patients in the control group was 209 days, the company said.
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