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Diet Drug Acomplia (Rimonabant) to Go on Sale This Week in Germany

Sanofi's highly-anticipated diet pill Acomplia (rimonabant), launched on June 28th in Britain, will go on sale in a second country this week -- but that country will not be the United States.

With still no word from Sanofi on where the diet drug stands with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the French pharmaceutical company is preparing to launch Acomplia on Wednesday, August 23rd, in Germany.

The revolutionary weight-loss drug was given official European Union marketing approval in June, but the process of actually getting it approved for sale to consumers varies greatly from one European country to another.

Sanofi said it hopes the product will be available in all the major European countries within "the next nine months," but at this point only Denmark, Ireland, Finland and Norway have been identified as countries where it also is expected to be available before the end of the year.

Meantime, Sanofi continues to emphasize it is promoting Acomplia to European doctors for use in treating for obese and overweight individuals with cardiovascular and pre-diabetic conditions -- and not simply as a wonder weight-loss drug as Acomplia is regularly described in media stories.

"This is the backbone of our (insurance) reimbursement strategy," Sanofi Executive Vice President Hanspeter Spek recently told analysts. " We are strongly convinced that we don’t have an obesity drug in front of us.

"This clearly is a product for obesity but (for patients) having additional problems in the cardiovascular and in the metabolic spheres," Spek said.

He also produced a survey of doctors in the U.K., Germany and the United States where they were asked what type of patients they would see as candidates for Acomplia.

While only eight percent of doctors in the United Kingdom and nine percent in Germany said they would prescribe Acomplia simply for weight-loss, Sanofi's survey showed that 19 percent of doctors in the United States think of rimonabant as an obesity drug.