Pharma obesity market: Roche seeks deals to challenge Lilly and Novo

The Swiss drugmaker said on Tuesday that it’s on the hunt for additional biotech partners to help it challenge weight-loss leaders Novo Nordisk A/S and Eli Lilly & Co. © Keystone / Georgios Kefalas

Roche Holding AG isn’t done making moves in the obesity market after last month’s agreement to buy Carmot Therapeutics Inc. for as much as $3.1 billion (CHF2.64 billion).

The Swiss drugmaker said on Tuesday that it’s on the hunt for additional biotech partners to help it challenge weight-loss leaders Novo Nordisk A/S and Eli Lilly & Co. Roche is looking for new ways of adjusting metabolism that could ultimately be combined with treatments it’s gaining in the Carmot deal.

“This is opening up a whole new vista for us,” James Sabry, Roche’s head of partnering, said in an interview on the sidelines of the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.

Carmot was one in a flurry of recent deals Roche has made to bolster its pipeline. The company is also interested in oncology, neurology and ophthalmology as well as cardiovascular medicine, Sabry said. 

While many companies are trying to break into the hot weight-loss market, Sabry said Roche is one of only a handful of suitors with the size and global reach to run the large, costly trials necessary to bring new drugs to market. Marketing obesity medicines is also more complicated than other areas like cancer because drugmakers need to deal with primary-care doctors instead of a few specialised treatment centres, he said.

“When we’re trying to get a deal done, we find more competitors in oncology,” he said. “You’d think everyone must be competing with you for metabolism drugs, but it’s not that way.”

Roche was one of the first pharmaceutical companies to work on an experimental drug in the GLP-1 class, a category that includes Novo’s Wegovy and Lilly’s Zepbound. But it halted development more than a decade ago after patients dropped out of a study due to side effects such as nausea.

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