Back in February, Endo took a whopping $3.5 billion write-down—but that wouldn’t be it for the year.
On Tuesday, the company reported $725 million in impairment charges, thanks largely to the restructuring of its manufacturing network and its pulling of pain med Opana ER from the market.
And that announcement came just one day after the Dublin drugmaker said it would raise by $775 million the amount it’s paying to wrap up the vaginal mesh saga that has been plaguing it for years. Between this year’s Q4 and the end of 2019, it’ll make settlement payments expected to cover about 22,000 U.S. liability claims, as well as all the international claims it’s aware of.
All in all, it’s been an expensive year for Endo, which has struggled in the face of executive turnover, industry-wide generics pricing pressure and more. The FDA’s June request that Endo nix long-acting opioid Opana—a $160 million seller thrust into the spotlight by the opioid addiction crisis—didn’t help.
The company did manage to record a street-beating Q2, though, triumphing in the face of low expectations. Notably, the “strength came … on the back of a beat in generics,” which generated $563 million versus analyst forecasts of $525 million, RBC Capital Markets analyst Randall Stanicky pointed out in a note to clients.
Still, “the reality is cash flow generation toward continued paydown of debt/mesh will remain the primary focus in the stock over the near-term,” he said.
Meanwhile, opioids continue to face scrutiny from all sides, with a U.S. cost watchdog taking aim Tuesday. The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) published its final report on the effectiveness and value of abuse-deterrent versions of the highly addictive meds, determining that the safer products needed an average 41% discount to make them “cost-neutral” with their predecessors.
By Carly Helfand
Source: Fierce Pharma
CureVac and the University of Texas’s MD Anderson Cancer Center have announced a co-development and licensing agreement to develop novel messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA)-based cancer vaccines. The strategic collaboration will focus on the development of differentiated cancer vaccine candidates in selected haematological and solid tumour indications with high unmet medical needs.
FUJIFILM Corporation is planning to invest $1.2 billion to expand the planned FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies manufacturing facility in Holly Springs, North Carolina, US. This news follows the organisation’s announcement of a $2 billion investment in the facility in March 2021. This additional financial boost totals the investment to over $3.2 billion, FUJIFILM confirmed.
Sanofi’s global restructuring and downsizing is now fully underway, with layoffs stretching to the company’s Belgian offices. Belgian newspaper De Tijd reports that 67 employees have been laid off at a site in Ghent and 32 jobs are on the chopping block at Sanofi’s Belgium HQ in Diegem.
