Pfizer to buy cancer drug developer Trillium in $2.3 bln deal link
Pfizer recently went to push Amarin's drug Vascepa in Canada Link
Only time will tell.
This coming week Amarin's drug Vascepa will be prestented at ESC congess on Aug 29th with results showing it pay help treat COVID patients. If you can, I suggest to go watch the results that day.
Also last moment to trade shares once the COVID treatment results comeout will be on the Frankfurt exchange.
Recent article below by Amarin's CEO below. Put in bold what he said was important.
Then, in March 2020, U.S federal courts invalidated several patents for Vascepa, opening the door to generic competition and potentially shrinking sales of the company’s once-promising drug.
Amarin’s stock price fell by 50% virtually overnight.
The court rulings could have been a death sentence for a company like Amarin. Instead, it has rebounded with a risky, unusually aggressive strategy for a small drugmaker that markets and sells a single pill.
Karim Mikhail, Amarin’s CEO and a 22-year veteran of Merck, said the company will launch sales of Vascepa next month in the European Union and plans to expand into Asia and Africa next year. The company also has added sales staff to battle generic drugmakers for U.S. sales.
“People who fought for the value that this product brings to the market are not letting go today,” he said. “They risked their careers … to prove a point that this product brings enormous benefit.”
It plans to thread the needle to profitability with overseas sales and fighting off U.S. generic competitors by pushing doctors to prescribe Vascepa to more heart patients. Here in the U.S., it must do so by selling a drug that on average costs 77% more than generics.
J.P. Morgan analyst Jessica Fye still believes Vascepa will be successful, she said in investor notes, but sales will ramp up over 10 years.
This month, former Amarin CEO John Thero was succeeded by Mikhail, Merck’s former chief marketing officer in Europe and emerging markets. His appointment and the expansion of Amarin’s sales staff indicated the company plans to go it alone.
“Investors may be disappointed in the transition and that it may signal no near-term merger and acquisition on the table (which is the clear and primary bull case to the stock),” Jefferies analyst Michael Yee wrote in a recent investor note.
Big pharmaceutical companies typically buy up startups to avoid the risk and expense of drug development. But companies like Amarin are rarely acquisition targets, according to studies by Michael Kinch, director of the Center for Drug Discovery at Washington University in St. Louis.
Vascepa joins a long list of cardiovascular drugs over the past two decades dominated by blockbusters marketed by Pfizer, Merck, Schering-Plough and AstraZeneca.
The most commonly prescribed heart medicines are today available as low-cost generics. And generics typically capture 95% of the brand-name’s sales three months after generic drugs hits the market, according to Wall Street analysts.
The generic version of Vascepa, has not experienced that level of success.
Mikhail said Vascepa was notoriously difficult to manufacture and the raw ingredients difficult to acquire in bulk. “Clearly, the generics never thought they would win this case,” he said. “The evidence is they were not ready with supply.”
The FDA says Vascepa’s mechanism in action to reduce stroke and heart attacks is “not completely understood.” Amarin claims the drug has anti-inflammatory properties and it has announced several academic centers are studying Vascepa as a possible treatment for colorectal cancer as well as Covid.
Mikhail said preliminary Covid study data is scheduled for release next week at the European Society of Cardiology Congress.
“You look at what Covid patients die from, they mostly die because of an inflammatory storm,” he said. “If the study is positive, and it has value in delaying progression in Covid patients … that would be incredible.”
It would also give Amarin another escape hatch to deliver shareholder value.
Submitted August 23, 2021 at 08:43AM by stillness0072 https://ift.tt/2WjghqM
