Dr Cate Lockhart Discusses the Market With Trastuzumab Biosimilars Now Available

Multiple trastuzumab biosimilars were approved and launched very quickly in the United States, which sets up an interesting scenario in the market to see the nuance of having multiple options available, said Cate Lockhart, PhD, PharmD, MS, program, director, Biologics and Biosimilars Collective Intelligence Consortium (BBCIC).

Transcript

What patterns are you seeing in the use of trastuzumab biosimilars in patients with HER2-positive cancer?

We started this trastuzumab or HER2 inhibitor study to get a sense of what's happening out there—not having any real quantitative sense, in a broad sense, in a broad population about what's happening now that there are multiple biosimilars available. And we found that, at least in these early stages, trastuzumab is looking to be another one of the biosimilar success stories, at least in these early days, where there has been substantial uptake of biosimilars of one in particular—the first one that that came out—but we're seeing increasing numbers of all the biosimilars utilization. And I think that's positive.

And from a BBCIC perspective, we've been keeping track of what's happening with utilization with all of these products, but trastuzumab being new and being one that has multiple biosimilars, I think this story is only going to get more interesting, I think as the next couple of years go on, and we get to see more mature use of each of the products in the marketplace.

I think, you know, one of the interesting elements of looking across all of the HER2 inhibitors now that there are multiple biosimilars available is understanding what happens in the marketplace, and clinically, when you have, all of a sudden, lots of options. And it was kind of all of a sudden. There was a very short time period where they became available kind of all at once. And so, I think it's going to be very interesting to watch over the next few years how the nuances of having multiple options play out in the market.