SK Biopharmaceuticals Co., a pharmaceutical affiliate of South Korea's SK Group, said Tuesday that its signature anti-epilepsy treatment, Xcopri, could generate US$1 billion in sales in the United States in 2029.
Xcopri, or cenobamate, is a medication for partial-onset seizures in adults discovered by SK Biopharmaceuticals and its U.S. subsidiary SK Life Science. It was approved for medical use in the U.S. in end-2019 and in Europe in 2021. It is sold under the brand name Ontozry in Europe.
Its total prescriptions, or TRx, a key metric used by the pharmaceutical industry to gauge a medicine's launch performance, reached a monthly 22,000 stateside this year and will grow to a monthly 30,000 next year to top the U.S. anti-epilepsy treatment market.
"We expect Xcopri to break even at the end of this year," the company's CEO Lee Dong-hoon said in a press conference. "In 2029, Xcopri's sales in the U.S. could reach $1 billion in 2029 before jumping to $3.5 billion in 2032.
Last year, sales of SK Biopharmaceuticals plunged 50.8 percent on-year to 456.7 billion won ($362 million).
"Xcopri has high gross profit margin of 90 percent and almost of its revenues become net profit," Lee said. "We estimate that we could earn more than $3.5 billion in cash from Xcopri in 2032."
The official said Xcopri will provide a stable cash flow in the following years and consequently give the company wider room to expand its business portfolio to become a global bio-tech platform company.
Lee said his company will strengthen its therapeutic modalities of radiopharmaceutical therapy (RPT), referring to a new class of cancer drugs that deliver radiation therapy directly and specifically to cancer cells, to achieve the goal.
Based on the business partnership between SK Group and TerraPower, a U.S. venture founded by Bill Gates that develops small-sized nuclear power reactors, SK Biopharm will seek rights for radioisotope supply to use in RPT medications.
The company will also reinforce its targeted protein degradation (TPD) platform, following the recent takeover of the U.S. biotech company Proteovant Therapeutics, which has advanced TPD technology that enables the tackling of disease-causing protein.
The cell and gene therapy sector is another key future modality of SK Biopharm, he added.
"SK Biopharmaceuticals will reposition itself as a global big biotech with a unique business model as it will extend its capability beyond being a single asset-based company into a tech platform one, while expanding into biologics from small molecule targeted therapy, and oncology central nervous system," Lee said.
Source: Yonhap News Agency