PremiumNEW DELHI: Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Ltd on Monday said it has reduced the price of its covid-19 drug FabiFlu by 27% to ₹75 per tablet. The branded generic of favipiravir was earlier sold at ₹103 per pill.
Through the price reduction, the company passed on the benefits it got from higher yields and better scale, as both the active pharmaceutical ingredients and formulations are made at Glenmark’s facilities in India, the Mumbai-based drugmaker said.
“Our internal research shows us that we launched FabiFlu in India at the lowest market cost as compared to the cost of Favipiravir in other countries where it is approved. And now we hope that this further price reduction will make it even more accessible for patients across the country," Alok Malik, senior vice president and head of India business at Glenmark, said.
While the API is manufactured at the company’s Gujarat production facility, the formulation is manufactured at the facility in Himachal Pradesh.
The company said the price of FabiFlu is much cheaper than the ₹600 per tablet in Russia, ₹378 per tablet in Japan, ₹350 per pill in Bangladesh and ₹215 per tablet in China.
The drugmaker on Monday also said it has started a post-marketing surveillance study on FabiFlu to closely monitor the efficacy and safety of the drug in 1,000 patients that are prescribed with the oral antiviral as part of an open label, multicenter, single-arm study.
“We expect this post marketing surveillance study to shed more light on the drug’s clinical effectiveness and safety in a large cohort of patients prescribed FabiFlu," Malik said.
The Drug Controller General of India had last month given an approval to Glenmark’s branded generic of favipiravir after a trial of 150 patients that started in May.
Approval for emergency use of the drug, however, has been criticised by experts due to lack of data globally, and also because the drug is used for patients with mild covid-19, who are usually cured at home with existing symptomatic treatments like paracetamol.
The company now is also conducting a trial on the use of favipiravir and umifenovir combination for treatment of moderate, hospitalized covid-19 patients.
