Two-year gap between biosimilar's approval and launch, report says

Swiss pharma giant Novartis’ (NOVN: VX) subsidiary Sandoz might have received US approval for Erelzi (etanercept-szzs), a biosimilar to US biotech major Amgen’s (Nasdaq: AMGN) Enbrel (etanercept), in August 2016, but it will not go on sale until 2018 at the earliest.

That is according to the news source Reuters, which quotes the head of generics at Sandoz as admitting that patients will be kept waiting for its version of the big-selling psoriasis drug because of Amgen’s patent protection challenge.

Richard Francis told Reuters that the legal fight would go on for at least another year, accepting frustration at the situation but saying that Sandoz was “carving the landscape out” for biosimilars as it went.