Buoyant Roche to enter cholesterol market
pharmafile | October 21, 2004 | News story | |
Roche has announced an alliance with a Japanese company to develop and market JTT-705 a promising new treatment for cholesterol.
The Swiss company has bounced back in 2004 after several years of static or falling profits, achieving impressive growth on the back of innovative drugs, in particular those co-marketed with its part-owned Genentech, new colorectal cancer drug Avastin and non-Hodgkinson's lymphoma treatment MabThera/Rituxan.
The partnership with US biotech company Genentech has transformed the company's oncology franchise, the strongest of its portfolios which include virology and transplantation medicines.
Roche has several marketed treatments for vascular conditions, but its licensing agreement on JTT-705 with Japanese Tobacco will provide a foothold in the lucrative lipid-lowering market.
The product, currently in phase II trials is a cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) inhibitor which works by increasing levels of high-density lipoproteins (HDL), so-called 'good' cholesterol in the blood.
"There are millions of people for whom the traditional methods of treating abnormal lipoprotein levels are not sufficient, and millions more who are not even treating their lipid disorders," said George Abercrombie, president and chief executive of Roche.
"This alliance puts us in a great position to develop a new approach for cholesterol and dyslipidaemia management."
Roche will have exclusive worldwide rights to develop and market the drug outside Japan and Korea, while Japanese Tobacco will receive the usual one-off payment and further milestone payments depending on the drug's development progress and royalties from sales.
The drug is in the same class as Pfizer's torcetrapib, which is now moving into phase III trials for use in a combination pill with the US company's cholesterol blockbuster Lipitor.
Roche announced its new alliance shortly after releasing strong results from the third quarter, which contributed to a 14% increase in pharmaceutical sales for the first nine months of the year, placing the group amongst the fastest growing major pharma companies.
Pharmaceutical sales were up 33% year-on-year, including contributions from Genentech medicines and Chugai products; diagnostics sales were up 7%. After adjusting for the disposal of its vitamins business and the consumer health division, which is being sold to Germany's Bayer, the company reported a 12% rise in year-on-year sales.
Sales growth materialised largely with the help of Genentech's products, the result of one of a number of successful deals that revitalised Roche's new product pipeline. Genentech's product sales increased by 54% year-on-year to $ 1 billion in the third quarter.
"We have maintained a consistently strong performance across our product portfolio, and we are pleased with the sales of Avastin, which reached $183 million for the quarter," said Myrtle Potter, president of commercial operations.
Tarceva, the latest promising cancer drug to emerge from Genentech's pipeline has just been filed with the FDA as a monotherapy to treat patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) after failure of at least one standard chemotherapy regimen.
The drug is in late-stage trials for a number of other indications, including as a first-line treatment for pancreatic cancer.
