Glaxo says Advair “very sustainable”

GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s (GSK.L) top-selling lung drug Advair looks “very sustainable” given the difficulties facing generic companies hoping to making cheap copies of the inhaled medicine, a top executive said on Tuesday.

Chief Strategy Officer David Redfern told the Reuters Health Summit the British-based drugmaker was increasingly confident about continued strong sales of the 5 billion pounds-a-year ($8 billion) blockbuster.

Maintaining Advair—which accounted for 18 percent of revenue in 2009—is crucial for Glaxo as it seeks to diversify its business to secure new long-term sources of revenue in emerging markets, vaccines and consumer health.

“Advair looks very sustainable. So if you take Advair out of the picture, the big generic exposures really blow through by the end of this year,” Redfern said.

Concerns about Advair have long overhung Glaxo shares, though investors’ fears were eased last week when Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd (TEVA.O), the world’s largest generics group, said it did not think it was possible to develop a U.S. generic copy that could be substituted for the original.

Instead, Teva plans to develop its own branded competitor for the U.S. market, which analysts do not expect to be available until 2016.

“The Teva announcement was good news but it confirmed what we thought was likely to be the position,” Redfern said, in the first comments by a Glaxo executive in reaction to the Teva news.

Looking across the company’s drug portfolio, Redfern said Glaxo had taken its main generic hits earlier than its rivals. For the industry as a whole, the biggest years of patent expiries still lie ahead in 2011 and 2012.

“I would say we are about 85 percent of the way through,” Redfern said.

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler, editing by Dave Zimmerman)