Medical Need Europe, a privately held pharmaceutical company headquartered in Sweden, focusing on the registration, distribution, marketing and sale of orphan drugs and niche speciality pharmaceuticals, has appointed Durbin, one of the world’s leading specialist medical suppliers and distributors of pharmaceuticals, to manage the warehousing and supply chain for a range of its products. Initially this agreement will involve a single product, MD1003, which is currently under clinical development for the management of progressive multiple sclerosis (MS).
Durbin will co-ordinate the distribution of MD1003 through its Managed Access Programme (MAP), which will enable patients with a physician-assessed clinical need to receive the product before it is commercially available.
'Initial feedback from neurologists and the MS community indicated that there will be requests for MD1003 on a Named Patient or Early Access basis. We believe our collaboration with Durbin will strengthen our logistical set-up and improve our ability to answer the requests for MD1003 in these markets,' said Peder Walberg, CEO of Medical Need.
He explained that while the company is very pleased with its existing partnership with BS Orphan to provide medical support services for its products in the UK, Ireland and Netherlands, Medical Need's upcoming pipeline of products for unmet medical needs required an additional logistics partner with regulatory expertise and experience that could be trusted to effectively manage the supply as requested and permitted. 'Durbin met these criteria, and we are very happy to be working with them,' he said.
Durbin has more than 20 years’ experience in Named Patient and Early Access programmes, working with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to distribute products on a global scale.
'Durbin has been managing several programmes within the MS arena, and we look forward to continuing to contribute to improved patient care through access to MD1003 in these markets. A project of this scale requires a specialist global distributor with regulatory experience, and our previous work, along with patient focus positions us well for our partnership with Medical Need,' said Leslie Morgan, CEO of Durbin.
Further treatments for the management of patients with unmet clinical needs in gastrointestinal and other conditions are expected to launch under this arrangement in the coming months.