Prostate cancer drug market forecast to grow from $3.6 billion in 2010 to $10.1 billion in 2020

Decision Resources, one of the world's leading research and advisory firms for pharmaceutical and healthcare issues, finds that, driven by the launches of several promising emerging therapies, the prostate cancer drug market will experience robust growth over the next decade, increasing from $3.6 billion in 2010 to $10.1 billion in 2020 in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and Japan.

“Zytiga will face fierce competition from MDV-3100 and both agents will become the largest selling drugs in the prostate cancer market by 2020, achieving sales of $1.6 billion each”

The findings from the Pharmacor topic entitled Prostate Cancer reveal that eight of the nine emerging therapies that are forecast to launch through 2020 will enter the metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer setting, including the launch of Johnson & Johnson/Janssen Biotech/Janssen-Cilag's Zytiga in 2011. Owing to its efficacy, favorable safety and tolerability profile, convenient delivery and physician familiarity with hormonal agents, Zytiga will experience rapid and widespread uptake. In prostate cancer patients who have previously received docetaxel, Medivation/Astellas Pharma's MDV-3100 has shown comparable median overall survival benefit to Zytiga and both agents—MDV-3100 and Zytiga—are poised to transform the prostate cancer drug market.

"Zytiga will face fierce competition from MDV-3100 and both agents will become the largest selling drugs in the prostate cancer market by 2020, achieving sales of $1.6 billion each," said Decision Resources Analyst Rachel Webster, D.Phil.

The findings also reveal that although Dendreon's Provenge was heralded as a breakthrough when it was approved in April 2010, the vaccine is facing significant market hurdles. These challenges include Provenge's complex manufacturing process compared with other available therapies, physician concern over reimbursement and the anticipated emergence of other agents that target the same population of patients.

The Pharmacor Patient Flow Model for Prostate Cancer, which includes the modeling of biochemical and metastatic recurrent cases of prostate cancer, finds that the number of men living with drug-treatable prostate cancer will increase from 2.8 million in 2010 to 4.3 million in 2025. Much of this increase will be among men living with metastatic disease which will more than double over the same period, from 195,000 in 2010 to 520,000 in 2025.

"Because the number of cases with metastatic disease represents only a small proportion of the total number of newly diagnosed cases each year, the majority of those that become eligible for treatment of metastatic disease are the result of distant recurrence from earlier stages of prostate cancer," said Decision Resources Principal Epidemiologist Mike Hughes, Ph.D. "To illustrate this, in 2010 there were 30,000 newly diagnosed cases of metastatic prostate cancer and Decision Resources calculates that there were an additional 86,000 who developed a distant recurrence of prostate cancer."