ProStrakan on route to profit as drug cleared

Published on Tuesday 30 June 2009 21:36

PROSTRAKAN is increasingly confident of hitting monthly break-even this year after being given early clearance to launch a cancer pain drug in France.

The Borders-based pharmaceutical firm has been loss-making since it floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2005, but rising sales and a US launch in late 2008 means it expects to start posting profits from 2010.

Yesterday, it announced that it had agreed price terms with French regulators to sell Abstral, an oral treatment for acute cancer pain, freeing it to launch the drug for sale later this month.

Analysts had expected Abstral, which ProStrakan already has on sale in the UK and Germany, to launch towards the end of the year.

France is seen as a key potential market for Abstral, because of high existing sales of fentanyl products, the opioid from which the cancer drug is formulated.

ProStrakan is expected to launch Abstral in Spain later this year, and analysts at Singer Capital Markets are forecasting that annual sales of the drug will reach 33 million by 2013.

Wilson Totten, chief executive of ProStrakan, said Abstral was starting to deliver the promise he believes it holds.

"Its launch in France, earlier than planned, gives us further confidence in our target of achieving break-even towards the end of 2009," he said.