July 12, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
It’s not exactly a secret that Paris-based Sanofi is on the prowl for acquisitions to bolster its sagging oncology portfolio. It’s ongoing hostile takeover for the Bay Area’s Medivation is the prime example.
The company’s chief scientific officer, Gary Nabel, recently provided some granularity to Sanofi’s interests. He noted to Bloomberg that the French company is looking for approved cancer drugs as well as experimental ones that use new knowledge or techniques. Medivation fits both of those, with its blockbuster Xtandi for prostate cancer, and a PARP inhibitor, talazoparib, in late stage trials for breast cancer patients with BRCA mutations.
“One part of the approach is to take mature assets and to maximize value from those,” Nabel told Bloomberg. “Those are late-stage acquisitions. But equally important, it’s looking at early stage developments like PARP inhibitors and others.”
Sanofi’s oncology presence has but hurt by patent expirations and generic competition. It also had a notable failure when it acquired the Bay Area’s BiPar Sciences in 2009. The drug it picked up in the deal, BSI-201, didn’t meet its endpoints in 2011.
Then the company made a strategic decision that made sense at the time, but didn’t pan out. While many companies began to look at immuno-oncology, such as Merck & Co. and Bristol-Myers Squibb , Sanofi focused on targeted cancer therapies. The poster child for that type of work is Novartis AG ’s Gleevec. Although Gleevec was enormously successful, even revolutionary, that type of work has proven to be a challenge with only a handful of successes.
“Unless you were very lucky, and had a very good understanding of the target that you were after in the individual patient,” Nabel told Bloomberg, “the success more broadly was going to be limited.”
Perhaps a step too slow, Sanofi tossed $2.2 billion into a deal with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals to push into immuno-oncology, specifically on checkpoint inhibitors targeting PD-1. The two companies have done okay with their new cholesterol medicine, Praluent, progress in cancer has been harder to see.
Although an acquisition of Medivation still seems likely, there are hints that Sanofi may be interested in other oncology companies as well. Nabel didn’t provide any specifics, but did say, “There’s innovation externally—late stage, where you pay more, but you get something that’s more defined. Early stage, where you pay less, and you take on more risk. But you can potentially pick up very transformative ideas early on. So we’d like to sample across that whole spectrum.”
Others have noted that Sanofi has an interest in the rare disease market as well, and that Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Alexion Pharmaceuticals might be interesting targets. Vertex markets Kalydeco and Orkambi for cystic fibrosis (CF), and has nine pipeline candidates in CF and cancer.
Alexion’s focus is rare diseases, with three approved drugs, Sliris to treat paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH) and atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome (aHUS), Strensiq to treat hypophosphatasia (HPP) and Kanuma to treat lysosomal acid lipase deficiency (LAL-D). Its pipeline is focused on various areas, including hematology, neurology, nephrology, metabolic disorders and inflammatory diseases.
There have also been rumors that if the Medivation deal falls through, Sanofi might go go after Novato, California-based BioMarin Pharmaceutical , best known for its failed Duchenne muscular dystrophy drug, Kyndrisa (drisapersen). If it is interested in BioMarin, it would be for rare genetic diseases, which include a pipeline for achondroplasia, CLN2 disease, Hemophilia A and Sanfilippo Syndrome. Already marketed drugs include Vimizim for Morquio A Syndrome, Kuvan for PKU, Naglazyme for MPS VI, Aldurazyme for MPS I, and Firdapse for LEMS.
