Biosimilars: A revolution for biologics in the pharmaceutical industry

Abstract

The high demand for and resulting financial success of biopharmaceutical products over the last three decades have seen the door open for close copies of these biological products. Popularly termed as biosimilars, these products hold immense potential for the pharmaceutical industry in terms of their applications and benefits. Biosimilars also pose to be of great promise to the Bangladesh pharmaceutical industry, with the commitment of drastically reducing its dependence on foreign imports of biopharmaceutics to meet local demand. Biosimilars have the additional advantage of requiring an abbreviated and streamlined approval process by a recognized regulatory body and are commercialized only after they have undergone clinical evaluation to verify that they are highly similar to already approved reference products. This paper seeks to provide an overview of biosimilar drugs and collate all relevant published data to assess the weight of available evidence that this new frontier holds promise for development in the drug industry. Furthermore, it aims to investigate the prospects of biosimilar development, employment and education within Bangladesh.