Roche Confirms Narrowed Pharma Focus, Fast Tracks Obesity-Drug Candidate — Update

By Helena Smolak

Roche confirmed a move to trim its pipeline and narrow its focus amid a push to fast track its entry into the weight-loss drug market.

The Swiss pharmaceutical company on Monday outlined its new pharmaceutical strategy through 2030 and said it narrowed the set of disease areas it targets to 11, including obesity, confirming a report by The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

Investors have been closely watching Roche's efforts to crack into the booming obesity market, which has lifted the fortunes of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly thanks to the huge popularity of drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound.

Roche said it expects to bring to market weight-loss drug candidates in injectable and oral formulations beyond 2028.

The company said it will fast track the mid- and late-stage trials of an experimental once-weekly weight-loss injection it is developing--known as CT-388--in addition to late-stage trials of its trontinemab treatment for Alzheimer's disease and an inflammatory bowel disease drug. The company aims to deliver 20 so-called transformative medicines by 2030, it said.

Roche said it plans to focus on five key therapeutic areas as part of its new pharma strategy through 2030. The company will prioritize work in the areas of neurology, oncology and hematology, immunology, ophthalmology, and cardiovascular, renal and metabolism diseases, it said.

Among those, oncology, neurology, and cardiovascular, renal and metabolism diseases are priority areas for the group's pharma and diagnostics divisions, as Roche is seeking a closer alignment between both businesses.

The company said it has no patent cliff ahead and that its portfolio of drugs already on the market will deliver growth until 2027, with core operating profit margins at least stable.

Alongside a push into the obesity market, Roche is set to increase its efficiency and success rate in its research-and-development activities. Roche aims to maintain R&D spending roughly flat in the short term, but it expects productivity to increase by launching a greater number of projects until 2030, targeting three times as many patients between 2020 and 2029. Concurrently, it aims to increase the success rate of late-stage trials by 22% by the end of the decade, the final bar before regulatory approval that its previous Alzheimer's disease and lung cancer experimental drugs failed to meet.

Roche's R&D core investments amounted to 13.24 billion Swiss francs ($15.75 billion) last year, making the company the second-biggest R&D spender in the industry behind Merck & Co., according to Visible Alpha data.

Write to Helena Smolak at helena.smolak@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 30, 2024 06:39 ET (10:39 GMT)

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