In Other News · United States

Source: Axios

Pharmaceutical companies facing a steep patent cliff are concluding the key to future profits may be customized treatments tailored to patients' genes and lifestyles — not blockbusters aimed at large patient populations.Why it matters: The pivot could influence which diseases get treated in the decades to come, and how much the health system pays. The stakes are huge. More than $500 billion in brand-name drug sales is potentially at risk from generic competition between 2026 and 2032, according to the consulting firm Evaluate.The latest: The race is on to find new treatments that each generate at least $2.4 billion in global sales, a new Iqvia Institute report finds.They're increasingly specialty treatments, biologics and rare disease drugs — with a small group of flagship products accounting for an outsized share of industry sales.GLP-1 drugs like Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Eli Lilly's Zepbound now define that elite category. The next wave could include "biological missiles" that combine antibodies with chemotherapy to target specific cancer cells. "As precision medicine continues to advance, similar approaches may extend beyond oncology into areas such as immunology, metabolic disease and neurology," the report states.Reality check: It's not clear whether all of the innovation will cure more people,...