Johnson & Johnson's (JNJ -0.69%) reported less-than-stellar results on its recent earnings call largely because of currency issues and poor performance of former-knockout hepatitis C drug Olysio.
In this video segment, Motley Fool healthcare contributor Todd Campbell shares with analyst Kristine Harjes which Johnson & Johnson drugs he thinks investors ought to be paying attention to in 2016. And despite it hauling in hundreds of millions of dollars in sales last year, the list doesn't include Olysio.
A full transcript follows the video.
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This podcast was recorded on Jan. 27, 2016.
Todd Campbell: The reason that people may want to not think too much about Olysio, and think instead about the other drugs that Johnson & Johnson has going on, in the success they're having with these other drugs, one of my favorites of all of those drugs has got to be Invokana. It's a type 2 diabetes drug, it's an SGLT2 drug, which simply means that it works very differently by helping to prevent how much glucose gets reabsorbed, and therefore, it allows more to get excreted by the patient. That drug has taken off like gangbusters.
Sales more than doubled in the past year to $1.3 billion. It's also got some other really intriguing drugs are doing well: Imbruvica, which is an oncology drug that they're partnering up with AbbVie on, that's now over $1 billion a year drug globally. Their share of that rose from $200 million to over $600 million last year. It's also got a drug for psoriasis called Stelara, which is dosed much less frequently than their top-selling Remicadeand other anti-TNF drugs that are used in autoimmune disease drugs. That drug saw its sales jump significantly to $2.4-$2.5 billion last year. So, there's a lot of drugs that are doing very well for the company that investors may want to focus on instead of Olysio, which is basically going to continue to see its sales decline and decline, as other hepatitis C drugs come to market.
Kristine Harjes: One thing I'll add on: Remicade has been the pivotal focus of the discussion on biosimilars, and whether or not that threat will become apparent to Johnson & Johnson. As a reminder, biosimilars are essentially generic versions of biologic drugs. So, they're a lot harder to make, they're not going to sell for as much of a discount, and they're pretty new, so we're still figuring out what exactly it means for some of these gigantic healthcare companies to face competition from newly introduced biosimilars.
