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Biohaven Scores Another FDA Approval On Its Quest To Beat Big Pharma



On Thursday, Connecticut-based pharmaceutical company Biohaven nabbed an FDA approval for Nurtec, the company’s migraine medication. Nurtec was approved in March of 2020 to treat acute migraines, but it has now been approved for migraine prevention — the first drug that has been FDA approved for both uses. “It's just going to change the way the whole field treats migraines," says Biohaven CEO Vlad Coric.

But what is perhaps even more impressive is that Biohaven, a company with a $5 billion market cap that IPO’d only four years ago, is taking on the likes of pharmaceutical behemoths AbbVie, Lilly and Teva. AbbVie, one of Biohaven’s biggest competitors, has nearly 50,000 employees compared to Biohaven’s 1,000. Its market cap is about 40 times bigger than Biohaven’s, yet the companies have been raking in similar revenue numbers on acute migraine drugs for the past year. In 2020, AbbVie’s Ubrelvy, Nurtec’s direct competitor, netted the company $65 million. Meanwhile, sales from Nurtec in 2020 hovered at $64 million. According to FiercePharma, Marc Goodman, an analyst at SVB Leerink, said that the new FDA approval could grow sales of Nurtec by $135 million.

"From the beginning I loved the David and Goliath comparisons people made,” Coric said, “And now we've shown that we can compete with them."

About 36 million Americans suffer from migraines, 85% of whom are women. Until recently, drugs for seizures, blood pressure and depression were commonly used off-label to prevent migraines. It was only in 2018 when a new class of drugs, called CGRP inhibitors, gained FDA approval exclusively for the prevention of migraines. Since then, anti-CGRP drugs have revitalized the migraine field. Yet these drugs aren’t a panacea: most require painful monthly injections and are only used to prevent migraines, not treat them once they begin. Coric hopes that Nurtec, a pill that dissolves orally, will be able to disrupt the market by doing both. He says patients can take Nurtec every other day, or as-needed for prevention if they know that they are about to encounter a migraine trigger.

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