Russia's Biocad shipping high-tech cancer drugs to Vietnam

Biocad, one of Russia’s leading biotechs, is the first company in the country to launch a $150 million effort to supply therapeutic products based on monoclonal antibodies to several countries outside Russia.

At the end of December Biocad made its first shipment to Vietnam.The country received high-tech product for treatment of certain types of blood cancer. This was the first shipment under the five-year contract with a local distributor. Previously, Vietnamese patients could count only on the original rituximab products by Swiss pharma giant Roche (ROG: SIX), but at a much higher price.

Biocad’s biosimilar of MabThera (rituximab) was approved in Russia in 2014and is marketed under the trade name AcellBia (The Pharma Letter May 15, 2014). AcellBia sales exceeded $155 million in 2014, representing more than 80% of global sales of non-originator rituximab biologicals, according to a Biocad web posting last October.

“Success of Russia’s biosimilar rituximab has several ingredients. The product’s high quality was proven in sizeable multinational clinical trials, yet its price is much lower than the originator’s. This opened new opportunities to supply biosimilar rituximab to the patients who knew that the original product had been prohibitively expensive for them.” says Biocad’s founder and chief executive Dmitri Morozov.