Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Eisai are targeting Japan’s growing pharma market with a pair of deals in the cardiovascular and oncology spaces, signing back-loaded agreements to push new drugs in the country.
Bristol-Myers and Pfizer, makers of the blood thinner Eliquis, inked a deal with Portola Pharmaceuticals to develop and launch the company’s reversal agent in Japan. Portola’s andexanet alfa, submitted for FDA approval in December, is an antidote to so-called Factor Xa inhibitors like Eliquis and Xarelto. Bristol-Myers and Pfizer are paying $15 million up front for the Japanese rights to the treatment, promising another $20 million tied to approval and up to $70 million more if Portola’s therapy meets its sales goals.
And Eisai, in a separate deal, has partnered with China’s Huya Bioscience on an investigational treatment for blood cancer. Eisai is handing over an undisclosed up-front payment and signing on to pay as much as $270 million more in exchange for the rights to HBI-8000 in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore. The drug is an oral treatment that targets enzymes called HDACs, which play a role in regulating the growth of tumor cells. Huya’s treatment is in development as a treatment for lymphoma and solid tumors, Eisai said.
For Bristol-Myers and Pfizer, pushing Portola’s drug forward is part of a global competition with other makers of next-generation anticoagulants, including Boehringer Ingelheim and partners Bayer and Johnson & Johnson. Boehringer’s Pradaxa got a leg up on its rivals last year when the German company won FDA approval for Praxbind, an in-house reversal agent for its blood thinner.
As for Eisai, the Japanese drugmaker is working to mend its balance sheet and build out a pipeline. Thanks in part to patent expiries for Alzheimer’s drug Aricept and acid reflux treatment AcipHex, Eisai’s revenues are on the decline. And the company’s latest launches, the weight-loss drug Belviq and seizure medication Fycompa, are facing exclusivity problems of their own. The company scored a much-needed victory last year with the FDA approval of Lenvima, a treatment for thyroid cancer that Eisai believes can bring in more than $1 billion in annual sales at its peak.
By Damian Garde
Source: Fierce Biotech
Antibiotic resistance remains one of the biggest public health challenges. New drugs are still needed to tackle tough-to-treat bacteria. But finding new therapeutics to kill off pathogenic bacteria has been difficult.
Viral vectors are engineered viruses used to deliver gene therapies, gene-modified cell therapies and certain vaccines. And their shortage is already upon us, thanks to manufacturing approaches that simply haven’t kept pace with the advance of cell and gene therapies.
Beigene, a fast-growing drugmaker based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Beijing, will partner with Shoreline Biosciences to develop cell therapies for cancer, expanding its research beyond the small molecule and antibody drugs.
