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
Researchers from University College London (UCL) have revealed that slow brain waves that occur during sleep could protect against increased brain excitability in patients living with epilepsy. In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers placed electrodes in 25 patients living with focal epilepsy to localise abnormal activity and inform surgical treatment.
StabiCaps gelatin formulation enhances the release of active ingredients, including medications. In May 2022, the Darling Ingredients brand also received a patent from the European Patent Office for StabiCaps for all major European countries.
In a move to participate in the race for anti-obesity drugs, Swiss pharma giant Roche has agreed to acquire Carmot Therapeutics, a privately owned US company based in Berkeley, California. Carmot’s R&D portfolio includes clinical stage subcutaneous and oral incretins with the potential to treat obesity in patients with and without diabetes, as well as a number of preclinical programs.
