One of the most popular drugs for the treatment of schizophrenia, psychoses, and bipolar disorder, “Seroquel”, has started to disappear from Russian pharmacies. The neuroleptic drug is not available in the popular dosages of 25 mg and 100 mg in most large pharmacy chains – “Rigla”, “Stolichki”, “Neofarma”, “Gorzdrav”, and “36.6”, the “Kommersant” newspaper found. It’s also impossible to order the medication through major online pharmacies – “Yaapteka” and “Zdravsiti”.
“Serokvel”, based on quetiapine, was introduced to the market in 1997 by the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca. In 2012, the patent for it expired, and in 2019, the company transferred the rights to this drug in Europe, including Russia, to the German company Cheplapharm Arzneimittel. The interruption in the supply of “Serokvel” to the Russian market is related to the transfer of the drug’s production, Anna Yavorskaya, the director of regulatory affairs at LLC “Pharmagate”, told “Kommersant”. According to her, this process is not quick and could last “more than a year”. She also added that Cheplapharm has sent a letter to Roszdravnadzor about the reasons for the drug’s shortage in Russian retail. According to the state register of medicinal products, at the moment, the pharmaceutical substance for “Serokvel” is produced in Belgium, the finished drug form – at AstraZeneca’s site in China, and the packaging – in the UK (The Moscow Times).
