One drug hit particularly hard by patent expiry is the statin Lipitor, which is used to treat high cholesterol levels. Worldwide sales of Lipitor in the third quarter of 2012 were $749 million, compared to $2.6 billion in the same period of 2011 — a drop of 71% (see Table 1 for drugs with large revenue losses). The loss of patent protection meant that worldwide sales of generic atorvastatin had reached $1.7 billion in the first 6 months of 2012 (Ref. 2).

Table 1 Drugs with large revenue losses in 2011–2012
Full size table

The impact of the patent cliff over the 2011–2012 period has also been notable in the psychiatry sector. According to Charlotte Mackey, a lead analyst at Datamonitor: “Four atypical antipsychotic drugs — Zyprexa (olanzapine), Seroquel, Geodon (ziprasidone) and Invega (paliperidone) — have lost US patent protection over this time frame.”

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