3 of pharma’s top 10 innovators in 2021. 3 novel drug approvals each

The pharma firms to pull off their respective regulatory hat tricks? Pfizer, 2022’s new champion atop the Innovation Index (an improvement of seven spots over last year’s PII) and fifth on the Invention Index; Merck & Co, tied for 4th in innovation with Johnson & Johnson (a nine-spot boost from the 2021 PII) and 10th in invention; and Sanofi, which slid three rungs from last year but still placed 10th on the latest Innovation Index while improving to 20th on the Invention Index.

At least one of these companies’ approvals will be a household name to most: Pfizer’s one-year-old super-blockbuster Comirnaty, the COVID-19 vaccine crafted in partnership with BioNTech and which knocked AbbVie’s Humira from its nearly decade-long perch as the world’s best-selling drug. The COVID vaccine nearly doubled Pfizer’s revenues in a single year, with $36.7 billion of its 2021 sales, or 45% of its $81.2 billion in total revenues, fueled by the mRNA jab alone. Pfizer is expecting another $32 billion in COVID vaccine sales this year.For context, Humira garnered $20.7 billion in 2021 sales.

But, strikingly, Pfizer had two other approvals in the vaccine space: TicoVac, a pioneering shot against tick-borne encephalitis in young children, and Prevnar 20, the latest product in Pfizer’s long-standing adult pneumonia vaccine franchise. That makes Pfizer the only company on this year’s list to have multiple novel approvals for infectious disease immunizations.

The other two firms with a trio of marketing green lights had a more diversified set of victories. In Merck’s case, there is Welireg, a new therapeutic for the treatment of the rare disorder von Hippel-Lindau disease, which causes non-cancerous tumors and cysts to grow inside the body. There’s Verquvo, which cut hospitalization and death risk in chronic heart failure patients in clinical trials. And, setting up competition with Pfizer’s Prevnar 20, Vaxneuvance, a pneumonia vaccine striving to prevent Pfizer from absolutely dominating yet another infectious disease market.

Finally, there is France’s Sanofi, which had an impressive year despite missing the boat on a COVID vaccine—an unexpected failure given the company’s general record of excellence in immunizations and infectious disease treatment. But its mix of new 2021 approvals is notable nonetheless: Nexviazyme for late-onset Pompe disease; the anti-parasitic Fexinidazole; and Rezurock, a drug Sanofi acquired through its purchase of Kadmon Holdings and which is approved to treat transplant patients with chronic graft-versus-host disease.

We’ll see how those therapies perform in the long term. For now, they collectively place three top 10 innovators atop the list of new launches during a year consumed by the COVID pandemic.