Drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY), Tuesday said its blood-thinner Effient or prasugrel, developed with Daiichi Sankyo, Inc., showed cost effectiveness when compared with clopidogrel or Plavix in a health economic substudy of the TRITON-TIMI 38 clinical trial.
Based on the economic analysis conducted on 6,705 study patients, Eli Lilly said the treatment with Effient helped reduce total hospitalization costs over approximately 15 months, not including the cost of study drugs, by $530 per patient, when compared to clopidogrel marketed by Sanofi Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Eli Lilly also said treatment with Effient compared with clopidogrel decreased cumulative medical costs by $221 per patient over the 14.7-month study. This includes cost of the active study drugs as well as costs associated with the initial and subsequent hospitalizations.
Study drug costs used in the analysis were the net wholesale price as of August 2009, which was $5.45 per day for Effient and $4.62 per day for clopidogrel.
Results of the study conducted among patients with acute coronary syndromes managed with percutaneous coronary intervention, including stenting was published in Circulation on January 5, 2010.
The analysis also compared Effient to generic clopidogrel at a hypothetical cost of $1 per day which also showed that treatment with Effient in the subpopulation as a whole was economically dominant during the first 30 days of treatment. Eli Lilly also said after day 31, although not cost-saving, the drug continued to be a cost-effective therapy relative to many other accepted medical interventions.
"The hypothetical comparison with generic clopidogrel is important because the patent exclusivity for Plavix will expire in 2011 or 2012. Results from this comparison to generic clopidogrel will be useful information for the medical community, especially payers, in the future," said David Cohen, director of cardiovascular research, Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute and professor of medicine, University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Eli Lilly also said the TRITON-TIMI 38 trial of Effient plus aspirin has also shown to significantly reduce the rate of a combined endpoint of cardiovascular death, nonfatal heart attack, or nonfatal stroke compared to clopidogrel plus ASA. Patients treated with Effient also had significantly fewer stent-related blood clots compared to those treated with clopidogrel.
TRITON-TIMI 38 was a Phase III, randomized, double-blind, head-to-head clinical trial comparing the effects of Effient versus clopidogrel with primary endpoint of the combined incidence of cardiovascular death, non-fatal heart attack or non-fatal stroke during a median period of at least 12 months following PCI. The study enrolled 13,608 patients at 707 trial sites in 30 countries.
LLY is currently trading at $35.76, down $0.51 or 1.42%, on a volume of 1.20 million shares.
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