Bipolar Today

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Decision Resources, a think tank that works in the biomedical field, has put forward a report arguing that the cost of bipolar drugs is expected to fall from $6.5 billion today to about $4 billion by 2020. The reason is that three of the most common antipsychotic medications, Zyprexa, Seroquel and Abilify, are all scheduled to become generic within the next few years. At the same time, there are fewer new medications in development than one might expect. As a result, they expect that the overall cost of bipolar medications will drop by almost 40% in the next decade. Their full press release can be found here.

Commentary

This is a mixed blessing for people with bipolar disorder. On the one hand, it will bring down the overall cost of medications for those who have the condition because commonly-prescribed medications will become far less espensive when they become generic. It will also bring down some of the pressure on the medical community to over-prescribe medications because there will not be a big financial motive behind such a push.

The downside is that, as bipolar disorder becomes what is called “generically flooded”, there becomes less and less incentive to develop new medications in the field. Unless a new medication especially stands out for some reason, there is little profit in developing a new medication that is marginally better than what is already available. As a result, research into new medications will stall (as it already has been doing with the upcoming patent deadlines for Zyprexa et al.).

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