Roche chief Severin Schwan is not shy of risks: The pharmaceutical giant wants to buy for $ 4.3 billion, the Biotech company, Spark Therapeutics, which generated last year, only $ 65 million in sales and $ 79 million loss made.
With the Acquisition want to buy a Roche a piece of the future. And the is expensive. Spark is developing new gene therapies against inherited blindness and hemophilia. “The opportunity is to provide the people with hemophilia (a blood disease, ed) with an even better gene therapy,” said Roche chief Swan to this newspaper.
Expensive and unique
It is a good start place in the race to this new form of treatment. Roche follows competitor Novartis, which has been taken with the acquisition of Avexis of 8.7 billion dollars is also a lot of money in the Hand.
The principle of the gene therapy sounds like Science Fiction, but Spark has brought with Luxturna a cure for hereditary Blindness to the market, the works. Here, a Virus is gutted GM and a new Gene. The envelope of the Virus is then used as a carrier, with the missing Gene involved in the body.
the advantage is that The treatment is unique. Disadvantage: it is expensive. Luxturna is approved in the US and Europe. In the United States Spark demands for the funds of 850 000 dollars. In the past year, Spark has sold in the United States 75 treatments. Outside the US the marketing rights to Novartis, the price is still to be determined.
The industry hopes to have with the new technology, the key to healing a number of diseases are found. Thanks to the Acquisition of “the Roche a leading Position in the emerging field of gene therapy,” to praise, for example, the analysts of US Bank Morgan Stanley. According to Schwan, Roche was not the only bidder for the Spark. Which group has made a bid, he says.
Spark has a number of treatments in the Pipeline, based on the above-described approach. For Roche, the most important of the candidate, SPK – 8011 is a treatment for the blood disease. Here Roche Hemlibra has already been a successful agent in the offering. Way buy Roche with Spark so a competitor?
“no. Both therapies are complementary,” says Roche CEO Schwan. “The gene therapy of Spark promises the blood patients need only one treatment.” But the therapy is not to speak in many patients, because the immune system blocks the treatment. “For these people Hemlibra remains the Alternative.”
Spark is here but not alone and is in the race with the US Biotech company, Biomarin, even in the back. Biomarin had submitted in the summer for his haemophilia gene therapy Valrox better study data than those of Spark. This led to the rate of Spark crashed to 27 per cent down.
Roche itself acknowledges are wrong
“Biomarin has a year advantage,” the Swan, because Biomarin is already present in this year, the results of its Phase III study. Spark will begin, however, until 2019, the Phase III trial for SPK-8011. “Nevertheless, we are convinced of the opportunities in the therapy of Spark, because according to these test results, the Spark-therapy, moreover, their effect is easier to predict,” says Swan. “It is better to be first; in the case of this new gene therapy, I don’t think the time advantage is so crucial, because there are alternative treatment options,” says Stefan Schneider, a pharmaceutical expert at Vontobel. Because gene therapy is only one treatment is necessary, it was crucial to how the security profile. “If the Spark can convince therapy to the product of Biomarin, it is secondary, that Spark comes Second to the market.”
But Roche may be wrong: as in the case of Intermune. Over 8 billion Swiss francs cost 2014 buying. However, the paragraphs have been fulfilled your Agent against lung fibrosis never lived up to expectations. A billion copyist was the result.
(editing Tamedia)
Created: 25.02.2019, at 23:21
