Biosimilar Atlas

Biologic medicines have transformed the treatment of cancer, arthritis, diabetes, kidney disease and eye disease. They have also become some of the most expensive medicines in healthcare. For a long time, access to these treatments depended heavily on where a patient lived and what their healthcare system could afford. Biosimilars have started to change that by giving healthcare systems more affordable alternatives to established biologic medicines. India was an early leader in biosimilars, and their use is now expanding across major markets around the world.

The economics are an important part of this. A biosimilar does not have to go through the same discovery and development process as the original biologic, which can reduce the cost of bringing it to market. When several products compete in the same market, this can create room for lower prices and wider access. For a hospital, that can mean treating more patients within the same budget. For a healthcare system, it can make more treatment options financially possible. For patients, it can make an important difference to whether a treatment is affordable at all.

But understanding the biosimilar landscape is difficult. Biologics are complex medicines produced using living cells, and demonstrating biosimilarity requires extensive analytical, non-clinical and clinical evidence. At the same time, each regulatory market has its own approval process, terminology and databases. The information exists, but it is spread across regulatory websites, approval documents and company sources. Even a simple question such as "Is there a biosimilar for this molecule, and where is it approved?" can take considerable time to answer properly.

This is why we built the Atlas. We wanted a single place where the global biosimilar landscape could be explored without having to search through multiple regulatory databases every time. The Atlas brings together biosimilars approved in the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, India and the UAE, with information on the molecule, product, manufacturer, marketing company and approval date. You can explore the landscape by molecule, company or market, and each entry points back to its regulatory source so the information can be verified and used for further work.

We built it with practical use in mind. A company evaluating a new biosimilar opportunity can use it to understand existing competition across markets. A buyer or hospital pharmacist can check which products are approved in a particular country. Researchers, students and others working in the field can use it to study how biosimilar approvals have evolved. The Atlas is free to use, and we will continue adding products, companies and markets as the landscape develops.

EvySaif works with companies on biosimilar development, regulatory strategy, submissions and scientific and medical writing. We originally started building the Atlas because we needed a reliable way to find and compare this information in our own work. As the database grew, we realised that the same information could be useful to many others working in biosimilars. So we decided to make it public rather than keep it as an internal resource.