Inside the GSK plant in Zebulon that will produce respiratory drugs including Arnuity and Incruse
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- Jason deBruyn
- Staff Writer- Triangle Business Journal
GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) commercially introduced two next-generation inhaler drugs Monday to the United States market. The GSK plant in Zebulon will soon manufacture the products, and top brass in London hope these products can help save GSK’s declining respiratory market share.
Glaxo made the drugs Arnuity and Incruse, available for once-daily treatments of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), respectively. Both are delivered using the Ellipta inhaler, GSK’s next generation version of the purple Diskus device, which many patients who suffer from respiratory diseases will recognize.
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That purple Diskus dispensed Advair, the hugely successful GSK asthma drug that in some years accounted for as much as 20 percent of the drug giant’s total company revenue. For reasons that include competition and pricing contracts, among others, Advair’s future will return fewer profits to GSK than its past, and now CEO Andrew Witty, and virtually everyone else in the company, will look to products like Arnuity and Incruse to fill in that lost revenue. As a result, GSK’s Zebulon plant will play a major role in GSK’s respiratory future.
“Forty years after the launch of our first respiratory therapy, we remain committed to innovation and helping a wide range of appropriate patients. These are the third and fourth respiratory products we’ve introduced since October 2013 in our patented Ellipta inhaler,” said Jorge Bartolome, senior vice president of the GSK Respiratory Business Unit in the U.S., in a statement. “The Ellipta allows for a common inhaler platform across our inhaled therapies approved since 2013.”
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Jason deBruyn covers the biopharmaceutical and health care industries. Follow him on Twitter @jasondebruyn.