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| Pharma's Vaccine Epidemic Goes Into Freefall | ||
 19 January 2010 Pharma's vaccine epidemic By Julian Hofmann The days when vaccines were the low growth cinderellas of the pharma industry, lacklustre divisions that companies felt able to offload over the past 20 years for a song, look to be long gone if GlaxoSmithKline's (GSK) latest update on sales of its pandemic 'flu vaccine is anything to go by. And this could explain the huge push into vaccines in recent years as the pharmaceutical giants have sought to kick-start growth. The boom in vaccine sales is perfectly illustrated by the performance of GSK's vaccines division in the fourth quarter. The division shipped almost £835m-worth of pandemic vaccines to governments during the period, compared with a mere £66m the year before. But this giant leap in sales could be about to come to a juddering halt if more governments follow Germany's lead and cut previously agreed orders: Germany will now take delivery of only 34m doses of vaccine, instead of the 50m the country's federal states had ordered. The cut makes financial sense for the country's health ministry, which stands to save €133m (£117m) on the renegotiated contract. Since Germany's move, other countries such as Greece and Ireland have announced reviews of their allocated shipments. This could be ominous for the vaccines market as its impressive growth over the past few years is directly related to governments' willingness to pay most of the costs. Business research consultancy Frost & Sullivan estimates that vaccines sales will grow from $4.5bn (£3.1bn) in 2007 to nearly $9.9bn in 2014. But no one can predict whether this will be sustained if governments rein in spending and patients have to make higher levels of co-payments for vaccinations. In the meantime, though, some companies are still benefiting from niche areas within vaccines. Dutch biotech company Crucell recently said sales of its paediatric vaccine, Quinavaxem, will top $750m between now and the end of 2012. That sort of performance is enough to tempt big pharma groups into the vaccines market, as Pfizer's $68bn takeover of Wyeth illustrated last year. |
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