Antifungals: 2004 and Beyond

The market for antifungal agents continues to grow. According to an article in BioBN, "the worldwide market for treatment of invasive fungal infections is estimated to reach $2.4 billion in 2003 and to grow to $3.1 billion in 2008." Diflucan, the world’s leading systemic antifungal, alone had sales of $1.176 billion in 2003. The growth of the antifungal market is due to several factors: 1) an increase in the number of people living in an immunocompromised state which makes them more susceptible to fungal infections 2) fungi are becoming increasingly resistant to standard therapies 3) many of the standard therapies have a high toxicity and/or significant adverse events which results in a need for more efficacious antifungals. One recent statistic from March 2004 claimed that "Out of nine million patients at-risk, 1.2 million will go on to develop fungal infections." Furthermore, according to the 43rd Annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, "within the last 5 years, infections due to clinically relevant fungi such as Candida, Aspergillus, and Fusarium have come to the forefront as common and significant causes of morbidity and mortality in immunocompromised patients."4 Thus, having an arsenal of effective antifungal agents to address fungal infections is of growing importance.

In this report, BioSeeker provides an overview of the most common fungal diseases, already marketed antifungal agents, details from recent studies on approved agents, and information on the recent activities of companies with developmental antifungals. More and more companies have become attracted to the antifungal market in the past decade for the following reasons: to address the unmet needs of an increasing patient population, to develop new compounds that can combat the fungi that have grown resistant to standard therapies, and to meet the challenges of reducing negative side effect profiles. This report explores the recent research on developmental compounds as well as life cycle management initiatives for existing therapies. As more antifungals become available, it will be increasingly important to determine which agents are the most effective against specific infections and to identify the ideal treatment protocols for each respective infection.

This 77-page report covers events that have occurred since May 2003 in the antifungal industry. Furthermore, the report only focuses on antifungal agents that are in phase III clinical trials and beyond. A complementary report discussing antifungal development pre-phase III will be published shortly.