After Pfizer announced earlier this week that it will sell a biosimilar version of Remicade, the blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis treatment, Johnson & Johnson executives are scrambling to calm investors who worry the health care giant will quickly lose a big chunk of revenue.
That’s because Pfizer plans to sell Inflectra at a 15 percent discount to Remicade, which generated roughly $1.2 billion in sales for Johnson & Johnson in this year’s first quarter. A biosimilar, you may recall, is a nearly identical variant of a biologic and is expected to provide the same result in patients, which means the Pfizer medicine is poised to eat into Remicade sales. The question, though, is by how much?
