The National Medical Products Administration of China (NMPA) released the news on Feb. 25 that the Rituximab Injection (trade name: Hanlikang) under Shanghai Henlius Biotech, Inc. has been approved for marketing. This is of a milestone meaning as it is the approval of the first Chinese-produced biosimilar, which has rapidly aroused heated discussions in the medical world.

We would wonder: why rituximab is the first Chinese-produced biosimilar? In fact, we would find out the reason if we looked into the situation of the original drug of rituximab: because this original drug is too excellent!
Originally developed by Genentech, Inc. (Roche), rituximab is the first monoclonal antibody approved by FDA for cancer treatment, which is mainly used to treat non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Rituximab has been among the global top 10 drugs by sales in recent years owing to its distinct efficacy, showing its leadership.
Let’s first see the list of global top 10 drugs by sales in 2018. We can see from Fig. II that sales of Rituxan reached USD3.483 billion in 2018, ranking fifth in the list. And certainly, this was not the best performance of Rituxan, which ranked among the top 3 in 2017, with sales of up to USD7.935 billion!
Ranking | Drug name | Developed by | Indication | Type | Sales/USD100 million |
1 | Humira | AbbVie | Autoimmune disease | Monoclonal antibody | 98.94 |
2 | Eliquis | BMS | Anticoagulant | Small molecule | 48.1 |
3 | Revlimid | Celgene | Multiple myeloma, etc. | Small molecule | 46.87 |
4 | Herceptin | Roche | Monoclonal antibody | 36.54 | |
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