2024-09-06 22:00:00
Pharmaceutical laboratories have long since ceased to be drug discoverers, but talent scouts. They scrutinize up-and-coming start-ups and biotechs all over the world with a view to entering into licensing agreements or even absorbing them. In 2024 alone, the PharmaCom-passa marketplace kept track of deals by only looking at deals worth more than $1 billion. Since January, there have been 56, totaling no less than $42 billion for mergers & acquisitions (M&A) and $64 billion for collaboration agreements. Unsurprisingly, innovation is coming from the United States. 59% of the biotechs that participated in these transactions are American (16% are Chinese). Only two French companies managed to participate. These are Medincell, which entered into a co-development agreement with AbbVie, and Amolyt Pharma, absorbed by AstraZeneca. But it is necessarily good news to ally with a major pharmaceutical company to ensure the best chances of success for its drug candidates in a long and costly clinical process.
We have just examined these operations from the perspective of biotechs. Let us now place ourselves on the side of the laboratories: the talent scouts. The most active, since the beginning of the year, are the Swiss with seven deals for Novartis and four for Roche. Then the entire top 10 of the pharma sector has carried out at least one operation of more than 1 billion $. Except Pfizer!
On the French side, our champion Sanofi has signed less than three operations, with Fulcrum Therapeutics, Inhibrx and Novavax. The French must think about feeding its pipeline, without interruption. Without this new blood, no Dupixent and the ten billion euros it provided in 2023. The famous anti-inflammatory monoclonal antibody, with indications that continue to grow, is the fruit of a partnership with the American Regeneron, signed in 2007. Sanofi is making the most of it, as is Regeneron, which posted a turnover of 13 billion $ in 2023, partly thanks to this windfall.
If the success of Dupixent is to be credited to the developer Sanofi, and not to the inventor, the same will be true for amlitelimab, frexalimab and SAR441566, three products with a blockbuster profile, with a potential of more than €5 billion in revenue by 2027. And if we follow the thread of their history, we see that all three are the result of adoption. Indeed, amlitelimab comes from the acquisition of the British company Kymab in 2021, for an initial payment of $1.1 billion and up to $350 million in milestone payments. Its little name was then KY1005 and it had already recorded positive results in phase IIa in the treatment of moderate to severe atopic dermatitis. Frexalima, formerly known as SAR441344, is also an immunotherapy resulting from a licensing agreement with the American biotech ImmuNext in 2017. Finally, SAR441466 was none other than DNL758 from Denali Therapeutics, a company with which Sanofi partnered in 2018 to advance its development in rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. The initial payment was $125 million, but the milestone payment could exceed $1 billion for Denali.
Which suggests that, in all these 2024 agreements listed by PharmaCompass, are probably hidden the blockbusters of the next decade. They will fuel innovation in oncology, because this area concerned a third of the transactions, compared to 10% for neurology and respiratory. Unless time accelerates, with AI finally ready to reshuffle the cards, creating unsuspected therapeutic opportunities.
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