TOKYO: The new Alzheimer’s disease drug developed jointly by major Japanese drugmaker Eisai Co. and US biopharmaceutical company Biogen Inc. is expected to earn billions of dollars a year, Eisai CEO Haruo Naito said Monday.

“There’s no doubt that annual sales of the drug will grow to billions of dollars,” Naito, 73, said in an interview.

Sales of the drug, aducanumab, which recently won the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval, are expected to grow sharply in the United States for the time being, Naito said, adding that China is likely to become a large market on par with the United States for the drug in the future.

Naito said that improvements in testing systems to detect Alzheimer’s disease in Asia, including Japan, will be a key to an expansion in aducanumab sales.

If a method for the diagnosis of the disease using blood samples is established, “obstacles will be removed at once, and the number of patients eligible to take the drug will increase sharply,” he said.

Annual aducanumab costs per patient are put at the equivalent of about 6 million yen in the United States.

The pricing is “reasonable,” Naito said, noting that treatment with the drug can reduce expenses, such as for long-term hospitalization.

The new treatment “provides significant value that other drugs cannot offer,” Naito said, stressing that aducanumab will allow Alzheimer’s patients to live without losing their personalities and make it easier for family members to take care of them.

Out-of-pocket expenses for the drug will be kept to a minimum in the United States because the country has sophisticated health insurance systems and support programs for distributing the drug for free, Naito said, rejecting the argument that related financial burdens on patients and their families are heavy.

Comparing the path to achieving fundamental treatment of Alzheimer’s disease to climbing to the top of Mount Everest, Naito said that the FDA approval for aducanumab is like “passing a mountain peak and setting foot in the Himalayas.”

“We don’t know if we’ll be able to scale Mount Everest, but we want to cross over one or two more mountain peaks,” Naito said, voicing his company’s eagerness to continue to be involved in the development of Alzheimer’s disease treatments.

JIJI Press