Positive results from a trial by Danish biotech company Genmab of its bone marrow cancer drug could lead to a launch as early as this year and it may become a blockbuster treatment earning $3.5 billion in annual revenues, analysts said.
Genmab said the study of daratumumab, which evaluated multiple myeloma patients who had already had at least three different lines of therapy unsuccessfully, showed an overall response rate of 29.2 percent.
The response rate indicated Genmab's drug worked better than two recently approved drugs, Onyx Pharmaceuticals' Kyprolis and Celgene's Pomalyst, although these have been tested in different ways, Sydbank analyst Soren Lontoft Hansen said.
Hansen said the data increased the probability of an approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and that it could be launched this year.
"We believe the data is very positive and well above the FDA threshold for approval. We therefore expect the study results to lead to U.S. approval of daratumumab in the second half of 2015," Danske Bank analysts said in a note.
Analysts at Jefferies sees an 80 percent probability of commercial success for daratumumab and that the drug could reach annual peak sales of $3.5 billion.
Jefferies expects a potential launch of daratumumab in the first half of 2016.
"It is because it has become more evident to the market that daratumumab is a very potent drug and that it is getting closer to an approval," Hansen said.