LONDON (Reuters) – Western generic drugmakers need to adapt to cope with rapid changes in the pharmaceuticals market that are blurring the distinctions between innovator companies and makers of cheaper copycat products.

That is the view of Claudio Albrecht, chief executive of Swiss-based Actavis, which struck a deal on Wednesday with QRxPharma to sell a new patented painkiller called MoxDuo that combines morphine and oxycodone.

Albrecht said he expected to do more such deals for patented and branded medicines in future, including a push into insulins, under deal to be signed shortly with Poland’s Bioton, and the development of so-called “biosimilar” drugs.

The pharmaceutical industry is currently going through a record wave of patent expires on mass-market medicines, with blockbusters like Pfizer’s Lipitor, for cholesterol, losing U.S. protection last month and AstraZeneca’s schizophrenia drug Seroquel facing generic rivals in 2012.

While this is a bonanza for makers of generics, Albrecht told Reuters that the game was about to change, with few conventional chemical products losing patent protection after 2014 as attention turns instead to expiries on biotech drugs.

Unlike chemical medicines, which can be given as pills, biotech products are impossible to copy precisely, forcing generic companies to develop biosimilars, which are close to the original but need to be sold as separate medicines.

“It means generic companies will have to start promoting again and it will become more of a scientific way of selling,” Albrecht said in a telephone interview from Zug.

LONDON, Dec 21 (Reuters) – AstraZeneca is placing new bets on drug research by signing deals with two Asian companies, just one day after suffering a double setback for two of its most important pipeline assets.

Britain’s second biggest drugmaker said on Wednesday it had struck a global deal to co-develop a novel cancer treatment from Hutchison China MediTech and bought options on a potential new class of diabetes pills from Astellas Pharma .

The deals go some way to bolster AstraZeneca’s pipeline of experimental medicines in two priority areas for the company, although the products are still at an early — and risky – phase of development.

Their addition to the portfolio will do little to offset investor concerns about AstraZeneca’s increasingly fragile pipeline of new drugs, which was further damaged on Tuesday by high-profile setbacks in cancer and depression.

AstraZeneca is taking $381.5 million in charges — pushing 2011 profits to the lower end of its forecast range — after dropping olaparib for ovarian cancer and announcing a second unsuccessful late-stage test for new antidepressant TC-5214.

It can ill-afford such failures, since it has few other products in late-stage development, with the exception of a new pill for rheumatoid arthritis, as it faces looming patent losses on blockbusters like Seroquel for schizophrenia and Nexium for heartburn and ulcers.

Its top-selling cholesterol fighter Crestor also has a tough time ahead, due to the arrival of cheap generic copies of Pfizer’s market-leading drug Lipitor in the key U.S. market last month.