Norman Swan

So the original versions of these could cost you $60,000, $100,000 a year.

Now, these biosimilars, there's a whole issue around patent and patent protection here.

But biosimilars are...

are drugs which purport to have the same effect as the original drug, but they're not generics.

So if you take a generic form of a statin, say, for cholesterol reduction, in theory, it's exactly the same drug as the branded drug.

Whereas biosimilars, because biologic drugs are complex, they're huge molecules, they're produced by biological processes, the biosimilars are not identical to the original drug.

So this is the key.

And this is what the barrier is to their use.

No, they're much cheaper.

So 21 biosimilars have actually been approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration as of last month.

Well, etanercept, for example, for rheumatoid arthritis, that has several biosimilars.

Rituximab, which is used in lymphoma amongst other things, that has a few biosimilars.

Tends to be drugs that are coming out of patent and they produce these biosimilars.

Now, for a generic to come on the market, they've just got to prove that the drug is the identical chemical drug.

For biosimilars, they do actually have to prove

equivalence in a clinical trial.

They don't have to show cure rates in the phase three, but they actually had to show equivalence.

But there's still a fair amount of resistance amongst specialists and non-GP specialists in cancer and rheumatology and so on to use biosimilars and get used to them because they're not the same drug.

And so what Sandoz is doing, self-interestedly, is trying to get a discussion going about this.

But potentially, it could save the country quite a lot of money if these biosimilars are just as effective.