Sensidose is growing and sees opportunities in Finland
The pharmaceutical company Sensidose is growing and sees new opportunities in new markets. According to yesterday’s year-end report, sales rose by 10.9 per cent in existing markets. At the same time, the company reported last week that the product Flexilev had been granted a subsidy in Finland. BioStock contacted CEO Jack Spira to learn more about new opportunities in Finland and continued market expansion.
Treatment of Parkinson’s disease at a later stage, the so-called wearing off phase, is complicated and standard therapy does not always provide sufficient symptom relief. Read more.
Spotlight-listed Sensidose is growing the market for Flexilev – the world’s first microtablet for individualised and fine-tuned treatment of Parkinson’s disease – which is offered to patients when standard therapy has not yielded satisfactory results.
The microtablets contain a small dose of the standard treatment levodopa, which allows the total dose to be adjusted incrementally, according to each patient’s individual needs by adjusting the number of tablets taken at each dose. Flexilev is dosed with the proprietary and approved dose dispenser MyFID. Learn more.
Sales increase
The company recently reported its annual report for 2022, which shows that Flexilev sales rose by 10.9 per cent in existing markets compared to 2021. Thus, the company sees further opportunities for market expansion.
Opportunities in Finland
Flexilev is approved in several countries, including Norway and Denmark, where Sensidose launched its product most recently.
In February 2023, Sensidose announced that the company had received an approved subsidy in Finland, which enables market exposure to be distributed there as well. The company was granted a subsidy for Flexilev by the Finnish Pharmaceutical Price Board, which is similar to the approvals received in the other Nordic countries.
Finnish Parkinson’s patients now have the same opportunities as their Nordic neighbours to receive individually adapted fine-tuned treatment. Sensidose estimates that about 16,000 people in Finland suffer from Parkinson’s disease.
Market expansion
Sensidose has communicated a continued focus on market expansion and the goal is to reach out more widely internationally with the treatment. Parkinson’s disease is the second most common of the neurodegenerative diseases, after Alzheimer’s, and the global need for alternative treatment methods is great. Learn more.
Comments from the CEO
BioStock contacted Sensidose’s CEO Jack Spira to know more about how the latest good news affects the company.
Jack, do you have any comment on this year’s results?
– Sensidose is growing, despite a lot of challenges during the year including a shortage of components. It shows that the demand for our product is great.
– Since we continue to invest a lot in new products and development, the result is not yet positive on the bottom line, but as we have taken the plunging investments in both existing and a new product, as well as with continued growth in existing markets, we can expect to make a profit every quarter already this year.
What does the subsidy in Finland mean for Sensidose?
– The market in Finland is almost as large as in Sweden for Parkinson’streatment, so we believe in it a lot. However, it takes time for the volumes to become large, as we have seen when we launched Flexilev in other Nordic countries. Many patients do not see their neurologist more than once a year, which means that the possibilities for initiating a new treatment are limited.
Now that the price application has been approved in Finland, how will you get the product on the market?
– We are in dialogue with a couple of companies that can help us with the marketing and distribution of the product in Finland. In Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, we have partly been able to do this ourselves, but since it is so important that patients are safe with their treatment, staff who know Finnish are required. It is therefore best to have a local resource for the Finnish market.
After the expansion in the Nordic countries, which market is the next step for Sensidose?
– The great potential of our product is of course outside the Nordic region. We have decided to work with one or more partners in other countries to get the product out, instead of investing in local sales and marketing organisations ourselves. So the choice of market will be together with the partner we sign an agreement with.
The content of BioStock’s news and analyses is independent but the work of BioStock is to a certain degree financed by life science companies. The above article concerns a company from which BioStock has received financing.
