The Food and Drug Administration has approved Winrevair, Merck's (MRK) latest drug to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension, a lung condition. Investors have been anxiously awaiting the approval as the company is set to lose its patent for Keytruda. The drug will help to reduce the risk of death and worsening events in patients by 84%.
Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani joins The Morning Brief to discuss how the treatment could offer a potential path to the upside for Merck.
For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Market Domination.
Editor's Note: This article was written by Gabriel Roy
Video Transcript
JOSH LIPTON: Looking now at shares of Merck jumping in today's trading. Merck getting a green light from the Food and Drug Administration on its drug to treat a rare progressive pulmonary disease. Yahoo Finance's very own Anjalee Khemlani joining us now to discuss. Anj.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: That's right, guys. Merck really enjoying the boost from the FDA approval on Wind River, the win for Merck. I had to do that. It is poised to be a blockbuster for the company.
Basically, they did get this clean slate from the FDA with no side effect warnings and no caveats to really restrict who the patient population is. Now, who is that? We are talking about pulmonary arterial hypertension patients. That's about 40,000 patients in the nation.
These doses do cost about 14,000 per patient per dose, which is every three weeks. So it amounts to about 242,000 per year for each patient. So they're looking at a pretty hefty number for the company to really sit on. And the reason why this is important for Merck is because they are facing that loss of exclusivity, the patent cliff for Keytruda, their main blockbuster right now, which is a cancer drug.
And so while that cancer isn't quite the same ballpark, this does help fill that hole that they're going to be facing as sales decline when competition comes on the market. There is also talk about an autoinjector. Right now, this drug is supposed to be an injection. But if they do sort of like the way you see the weight loss drugs the self-injection route, then that also increases the potential market size with people willing to do that.
So that's a little bit in the future. But that really puts on the table why this is such an important drug for Merck to get because it has been relying on Keytruda for so long to boost its sales. So that's important to note. It's something that we've seen analysts at JP Morgan saying that this is why Merck is a favorite and differentiate it from other large cap which are also facing that loss of patent problem in the coming and through the end of the decade.
JOSH LIPTON: Got it, Anj. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
