Selling Obesity Drugs to Americans Shouldn't Be This tough
The 79 million obese adults in the U.S. should be a marketing dream for the makers of anti-obesity drugs, and today Contrave, the most recent treatment to get approval in the Fda, will zi xiu tang attempt to win over a population in which more than 1 in 3 adults are obese. Yet sales happen to be weak for the prescription medications already available, Qsymia and Belviq, both approved in 2012. Why has it been so difficult to pitch pharmaceutical weight loss for an overweight nation?
A lot of the resistance to the weight-loss medications stems from the disastrous safety record of diet drugs pulled in the market within the 1990s. And, perhaps more essential, a large number of health insurance plans won't pay for the drugs, which frequently lead to only modest weight loss. In numerous studies, for example, nondiabetic patients taking Contrave lost only 4.1 % more weight than those taking placebos.
Orexigen Therapeutics (OREX), the producer of Contrave, sees a U.S. market in which only two million of approximately 100 million prospective customers are presently given medication. Mark Booth, the company's chief commercial officer, described the U.S. as a "large, growing rapidly, and a vastly underserved market" throughout a business call a week ago.
The drugmaker promises to solve the riddle of American desire not to anti-obesity pills with sales outreach fruta planta diet pills to doctors, along with the eventual rollout of print an internet-based ads encouraging patients to ask their doctors about the treatment. Contrave enters the U.S. with one clear advantage over its rivals: Orexigen is enlisting the 900-person U.S. sales team of Japanese pharmaceutical giant Takeda (4502:JP) to market its treatment. That provides the drug far larger sales muscle than can be mustered by the small companies behind Qsymia and Belviq.