Eric Thayer/Bloomberg News
Generic [pills] are much cheaper in the U.S. than abroad because of the intense price competition that patent expiration unleashes…. But biologic medicines—the injectable large-molecule drugs that have transformed the treatment of illnesses such as cancer and autoimmune disease—tell a different story.
Replicating a large, complex protein closely enough to satisfy regulators, at development costs that can run up to hundreds of millions of dollars…
There is now a way to work around this for some diseases… A new class of American-developed drugs, oral biomimetic engineered cyclic peptides, or eCPs, can in some cases replicate the therapeutic function of an injected biologic in pill form without replicating its complex structure. Rather than reverse-engineering a large molecule, eCPs can hit the same biological target and produce the same clinical effect through a much simpler molecule. That these molecules are easier to manufacture matters greatly for competition.