Roche has about $10 billion in M&A firepower it can deploy every year, but it’s “not just going to spend money,” the company’s pharma CEO Teresa Graham said at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.
Roche is fully ready to deploy the money “if and when we find transformative assets that are either complementary to our portfolio or, again, change the game in important diseases outside of those focus areas,” Graham said Monday.
The Swiss pharma didn’t spend that much on business development last year, J.P. Morgan analyst Richard Vosser noted during the Q&A session of Graham’s presentation.
Last fall, Roche unveiled a new pharma strategy, placing a focus on the five therapeutic areas of neurology, oncology/hematology, immunology, ophthalmology and CVRM (cardiovascular renal metabolic).
Some of Roche’s recent deals in these focus areas include an antibody-drug conjugate pact with Innovent Biologics, the $1.5 billion acquisition of off-the-shelf CAR-T partner Poseida Therapeutics, the purchase of Wnt signaling-focused biotech AntlerA Therapeutics and the $850 million upfront licensing of a portfolio of CDK inhibitors from China’s Regor Pharmaceuticals. As Graham noted Monday, Roche has had a strong presence in China and will continue to look for assets in the country.
Roche wants to get in on differentiated assets with the potential to help a large number of patients around the world, Graham added.
Roche recently took a hard look at its internal pipeline, a process that led the company to discontinue about 30% of its pipeline so far, according to Graham. Still, the company expects its R&D spending to remain flat in 2025; while Roche will “continue to be very disciplined” in resource allocation, it will also make sure to maintain sufficient investments in its research programs, the exec said.
“As we’ve culled so many things out of our portfolio, we have freed up a lot of oxygen to actually invest in new programs that may be internal or external,” the Roche exec said.
According to Graham, Roche's late-stage program will look “materially different” in 2026 than it is today; about 18 programs may enter late-stage testing or graduate from that phase in the next 18 months.
But, as is always the reality with drug development, not all Roche candidates, including those in-licensed, may succeed as planned.
During Monday’s presentation, Graham said Roche is not giving up on its Prothena-partnered prasinezumab in Parkinson’s disease despite a phase 2b flop disclosed in December. While the PAVODA trial missed its primary endpoint of time to confirmed motor progression, Roche has noted a more pronounced effect for the anti-alpha-synuclein antibody in levodopa-pretreated patients.
“Given the high level of unmet need for these patients, we decided that the important thing to do is to let the [open-label extension] data mature a little bit longer before we actually take a decision on where we wanted to head” with prasinezumab, Graham said during her presentation.
Roche wants to thoroughly evaluate the results and make a data-driven decision. The company will be able to share more later this year, Graham said.
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