Top Selling Biologics for 2011 by @CellCultureDish

Two weeks ago, The Cell Culture Dish posted their list of top selling biologics for 2011.

It's a good read.  TheDish points out that though even though CHO is a decades-old technology, it remains the "workhorse" of the biologics industry 20-years after its first application.

Pareto Plot showing CHO rules the Top 10

Of the Top 10 biologics sold in 2011, almost 40 billion dollars were biologics produced from CHO; this figure accounts for 75% of Top 10 worldwide sales.  E.Coli stood at about 12% of total Top 10 list.

How much longer can CHO remain dominant?  According to TheDish, there area 3 areas of work to keep that dominance going:

1. Gene synthesis
2. Media optimization
3. Perfusion

My opinion on the dominance of CHO is simply momentum.  The cost of Genentech/Roche switching off CHO is too great when the infrastructure to produce antibodies with CHO is already in place.

For grins, I made a pareto by company:

And the ranking goes:

1. Roche
2. Amgen
3. Abbott

I know it says BiogenIdec as 3rd, but the Rituxan accounted for 6.7 billion in sales, but not all of it goes to BiogenIdec; I'm pretty sure it is split with (Genentech)/Roche.  So that Roche bar ought to be taller and the BiogenIdec bar ought to be shorter.

Nice read, TheDish... nice read.