News

Following a multi-year restructuring programme, H. Lundbeck A/S delivered a gross profit margin of 29.3% in 2018, along with higher revenue and an increase in operating profit. Deborah Dunsire, who became chief executive on 1 September 2018, said the outcome was the company’s “best financial result ever.”

Group revenue was DKK 18.1 billion (€2.4 billion), up by 5% from a year earlier while operating profit was DKK 5.3 billion, up by 20%. The gross operating margin of 29.3% compares with a margin of 25.6% the year before and is above the company’s long-term target of 25%.

Sanofi SA is restructuring its portfolio to focus on developing new specialty care medicines including those for rare blood disorders, while maintaining a commitment to vaccines. The France-based multinational gave the R&D update with the release of its 2018 financial results which showed a decline in both group sales and net income.

Group sales were €34.5 billion, down by 1.7% while net income was €4.3 billion, down by 48.8%, in accordance with international financial reporting standards.

Avacta Group Plc, which is developing a new type of protein therapeutic, is to license certain assets to Moderna Therapeutics Inc against a potential therapeutic target which has been part of an ongoing research collaboration between the two companies. In an announcement on 4 February, Avacta said that Moderna has exercised an option to the technology. As a result, it may receive undisclosed payments for reaching future clinical development milestones, as well as royalties on future product sales.

The UK contract research organisation Metrion Biosciences Ltd has entered into a collaboration with LifeArc (formerly Medical Research Council Technology) to discover new drugs in the field of neurology. The goal is to identify selective small molecule modulators of a specific ion channel target which gene association studies have identified as likely to be involved with neurological diseases.

Patent litigation involving two of Europe’s most important antibody companies plus Janssen Biotech formally ended on 31 January after the parties agreed to drop their mutual claims. The lawsuit was brought by MorphoSys AG against Genmab A/S and its partner Janssen relating to Darzalex (daratumumab), the latter companies’ marketed drug for multiple myeloma.

The pace of change accelerated at GlaxoSmithKline Plc in 2018 as the company redirected its therapeutic focus towards oncology and took the first steps towards spinning off its consumer products business into a separate company. Emma Walmsley, chief executive since April 2017, said in a teleconference on 6 February that the company’s key priority going forward is to “rebuild the pharmaceutical pipeline.”

GlaxoSmithKline Plc has entered into a cancer collaboration with Merck KGaA of Germany which features a direct challenge to Keytruda’s (pembrolizumab) dominant position in lung cancer. Announced on 5 February, the partnership involves the co-development and commercialisation of the Merck asset M7824 (bintrafusp alfa) which is an investigational bifunctional fusion protein immunotherapy.

The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) has launched a call for proposals from the scientific community to help it create a large chemogenomics library for drug discovery, access to which would be unrestricted.

The project is one of three announced on 22 January which will have a budget of more than €80 million. The other two projects are on obesity and the environmental impacts of medicines. The library project is directed at the wider academic community, many of whom do not have access to proprietary tool compounds collected by industry.

Novo Nordisk A/S reported flat sales and a decline in operating profit in 2018 as the impact of lower insulin prices in the US continued to weigh on the company’s financial results. But the outcome was better than the company’s own forecast, largely due to the strong performance of the glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) products Victoza and Ozempic for Type 2 diabetes and the obesity product Saxenda.

The Roche Group ended 2018 with sales of CHF 56.9 billion ($57.16 billion), up by 7% from a year earlier, and US regulatory approvals for two new cancer medicines as well as a drug for treating acute uncomplicated influenza. The company had an operating profit of CHF 14.8 billion, up by 13.5% from a year earlier.