The sales of Samsung Bioepis’ Benepali (Original: Enbrel) and Flixabi (Original: Remicade) in Europe sharply increased to surpass 400 billion won ($375 million) last year.

A corporate earnings report by Biogen, the company’s sales partner in Europe, showed that the sales of the two drugs rose 277 percent year-on-year in 2017 to 417.8 billion won.

Benepali's European sales totaled $370.8 million, up 269 percent from 2016, while those of Flixabi exceeded $9 million, up a whopping 9,000 percent from the previous year.

“The sharp increase in sales for Flixabi is due to successful bidding in France, Italy, and Belgium,” the company said in a statement.

The company also expects that Benepali will continue its steady growth this year as a dermatology journal has recently outlined that the biosimilar has fewer injection-site reactions (ISRs) and less immunogenicity than its original drug Enbrel while maintaining equivalent efficacy.

According to British Journal of Dermatology, Benepali reported only 3.7 percent of ISRs in patients, while Enbrel reported 17.5 percent. Also, when the team evaluated the correlation between the anti-drug antibody (ADA) and ISR, the ADA incidence for Benepali stood at 1 percent, compared to 13.1 percent recorded by Enbrel.

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