June 30, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
PARSIPPANY, N.J. – As the opioid epidemic continues to plague the United States, one company that has developed a non-opioid pain relief treatment for post-surgical use, could see explosive growth over the next three years.
After some bumps and stumbles that includes a warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), New Jersey-based Pacira Pharmaceuticals is expected to see annual sales growth of about 20 percent by 2020, analyst Sean Williams predicts in his latest posting at The Motley Fool. So far in the first quarter of this year, Williams said the company has seen steady sales growth of 6 percent to $69.3 million. The current growth, plus the expected growth through 2020 is expected to significantly turn around per-share profits. Williams said the company was looking at a loss of 1 cent per share this year, but the new projections, fueled by a new indication for Exparel, will show per-share profits of $3.90 – a 39,100 percent growth in earnings per share.
Shares of Pacira are down slightly this morning, trading at $47.85 as of 10:21 a.m.
Although Pacira is still a single-drug company, Williams said the company “is looking like it has the formula for success.”
Part of Pacira’s expected growth is fueled by its new partnership with Massachusetts-based DePuy Synthes. In January, the two companies forged a co-promotional deal for Exparel. The agreement allows DePuy Synthes to promote Exparel across its joint reconstruction, spine, sports medicine, and trauma businesses to help with postsurgical patient pain.
Exparel, a liposome injection of bupivacaine, is a single-dose local anesthetic injected into a surgical site as a post-surgical pain treatment. The drug provides targeted, non-opioid pain control by working right at the site of surgery, allowing for long-lasting pain relief. The drug has been approved for soft-tissue surgeries, orthopedic patients and for oral surgery. It was initially approved in 2011. In 2014, Pacira was slapped with a warning letter from the FDA for marketing Exparel for off-label use. However the warning letter was rescinded in 2015, after the federal agency examined the wording of the initial approval of Exparel and found the company was not violating marketing practices.
One of the things that makes Exparel and Pacira so attractive to Williams is the fact Exparel is a non-opioid pain treatment. In 2015, there were more than 20,000 deaths associated with opioid pain pill overdoses. The concern over opioid abuse has continued unabated since 2015. Last month, the FDA asked Endo Pharmaceuticals to remove its opioid pain medication, reformulated Opana ER, from the market due to abuse concerns.
