After years of out-licensing, product sales and whatever else it took to float the sinking AstraZeneca ship, CEO Pascal Soriot is now a buyer. And he’s going big.
Thursday night, Soriot announced that AstraZeneca is paying Daiichi Sankyo $1.35 billion upfront to partner on trastuzumab deruxtecan, an antibody drug conjugate for HER2 expressing cancers. Half arrives with the signing, the other half in a year. And Soriot is adding up to $5.55 billion more in development and commercial milestones, for a total of $6.9 billion, one of the largest pacts the company has ever struck.
In exchange for sharing development and commercialization costs, AstraZeneca will also share in the profits — which Soriot clearly believes has mega-blockbuster potential in oncology — a field that AstraZeneca has bet big on.
The pharma giant is funding the deal with a sale of $3.5 billion in shares and expects a quick payback, with the first regulatory filing in H2.
“We believe that [fam-] trastuzumab deruxtecan could become a transformative new medicine for the treatment of HER2 positive breast and gastric cancers,” said Soriot. “In addition, [fam-] trastuzumab deruxtecan has the potential to redefine breast cancer treatment as the first therapy for HER2 low expressing tumors. It also has the potential to treat other HER2 mutated or HER2 overexpressing tumors, including lung and colorectal cancers. We are proud to be working with Daiichi Sankyo, a long-term collaborator of AstraZeneca in other disease areas.”
The deal is possible because after 6 years, Soriot has finally gained credibility in claiming a turnaround after a lengthy period of falling numbers. And he owes that to the success of Lynparza and Tagrisso and to a certain extent the PD-L1 checkpoint Imfinzi.
If they are successful, the two partners will split things up like this: Daiichi Sankyo will book sales in the US and certain countries in Europe, plus other markets where Daiichi Sankyo has affiliates. AstraZeneca is expected to book sales in all other markets worldwide, including China, Australia, Canada and Russia.
Daiichi Sankyo CEO George Nakayama called this drug the “flagship” therapy in its oncology pipeline.
Here’s the ADC:
The drug is a “humanized HER2 antibody attached to a novel topoisomerase I inhibitor payload by a tetrapeptide-based linker. It is designed to target and deliver chemotherapy inside cancer cells and reduce systemic exposure to the cytotoxic payload compared to the way chemotherapy is commonly delivered.”
The drug (DS-8201), is in pivotal development for multiple HER2 expressing cancers including breast and gastric cancer, with an added focus on non-small cell lung and colorectal cancer.
This pact comes just months after Soriot executed a top-to-bottom R&D revamp, eliminating its old MedImmune operations and splitting the development operations between cancer — under new arrival Jose Baselga — and everything else under Mene Pangalos.
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