By: Sruthy Iype  Sep. 18, 2020

Dexur’s analysis of Medicare claims data showed that Entyvio was used in five times as many Crohn’s disease patients compared to Stelara in 2019. The analysis looked at the J code usage of the drugs (J3380/J3357) among Medicare patients who received treatment in hospital outpatient settings between Jan 2017 and Dec 2019. The analysis also looks at the average claims per patient data, which is a proxy for the number of injections / IV infusions / doses administered to a patient.

Although TNF-inhibitors have been the preferred first-line biologic agents in the treatment of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD), alternate therapies with different mechanisms of action like Takeda’s Entyvio (vedolizumab) and Janssen’s Stelara (ustekinumab) have been successful in capturing an increasing share of the market in recent years, especially in the second-line treatment segment. Both drugs, indicated for the treatment of adult patients with moderately to severely active Ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, act via different mechanisms - Entyvio blocks the action of the intestinal-specific α4β7 integrin and Stelara targets interleukin-12 and interleukin-23 - to reduce inflammation and inhibit disease progression. This study looks at the patient shares associated with the use of Entyvio and Stelara in Crohn’s disease (CD), a disease segment where the two drugs have been involved in head-to-head competition.

Entyvio usage among Crohn’s disease patients surpassed that of Stelara across all three years of the study. However, Stelara’s patient share for the disease grew exponentially during this period, resulting in the progressive shrinkage of the gap between the market shares of the two drugs. While the CD patient share of Entyvio exceeded Stelara by more than 8 times in 2017, the patients who were administered the former drug was about 5 times the proportion of patients who were administered the latter in 2019. A staggering 72 percent increase was observed in Stelara’s CD patient share in 2019 compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, Entyvio also showed a steady increase, of 19 to 21 percent, year after year during the period of study, which has helped it in maintaining its dominance in the market segment. Crohn’s disease patients had about 4.5 claims each in a year for Entyvio and 4.9 claims per year for Stelara.