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Roche plans to buy immunology company Telavant from Roivant Sciences and Pfizer for over $7bn, as the drugmaker’s new chief executive seeks to replenish its drug pipeline.
The Swiss company will acquire the rights to develop and manufacture Telavant’s potential drug for inflammatory bowel disease, which affects almost 8mn people worldwide. It will acquire the rights to sell it in the US, where there is a $15bn market for IBD, and in Japan.
Thomas Schinecker, who took over as Roche chief executive in March, said the drug, which is ready to start a late-stage trial, had “transformational potential”.
Roche will pay $7.1bn upfront and a near-term milestone payment of $150mn. Pfizer will keep the commercialisation rights outside the US and Japan. Roivant owns 75 per cent of Telavant, while Pfizer owns 25 per cent.
Schinecker said last month that the company was open to making large acquisitions, if they made financial sense. He was previously chief of the Roche diagnostics business, and is now focusing on improving the future of the pharmaceutical division with internal development and deals, after disappointments including two of its late-stage Alzheimer’s drug trials, which ended in failure last year.
This deal comes after Roche announced a partnership with Alnylam worth up to $2.8bn to work together on an innovative medicine for hypertension.
Large pharmaceutical companies are increasingly interested in immunology — tackling diseases often caused by an overactive immune system — because of the large number of affected patients. AbbVie’s Humira, used for a range of autoimmune diseases, became the world’s best-selling drug but has recently had its market exclusivity expire.
Teresa Graham, chief executive of Roche’s pharmaceutical division, said more patients suffered from diseases of the immune system than from cancer, and the current drugs did not serve them well. Now, she said, the science was starting to evolve rapidly.
“Despite advances in therapy, there really have been no cures for these diseases. They’re incredibly impactful to individuals and to families. They put a lot of strain on healthcare systems,” she told the Financial Times.
“As we understand more and more about the biology of the human immune system, we will continue to find new and novel ways to target these diseases, and potentially, not only create a really meaningful benefit for individual patients, but also remove a lot of burden off of global healthcare systems.”
Roche said that Telavant’s drug, known as RVT-3101, had the potential to be applied to conditions beyond inflammatory bowel disease, because the antibody tackles both inflammation and fibrosis.
In a phase-2b trial of patients with moderate to severe ulcerative colitis, a type of inflammatory bowel disease, it improved clinical remission by 36 per cent in 56 weeks, compared with placebo. The trial also showed that the drug was safe.
Roivant Sciences, which has a portfolio of companies, was founded in 2014 by Vivek Ramaswamy, who is now running for US president. Ramaswamy owned a 7 per cent stake in the company, as of last month, but is no longer associated with running it.
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