New York: Large drugmakers with piles of cash are on the hunt for promising medicines being developed by small companies to treat NASH, a progressive fatty liver disease poised to become the leading cause of liver transplants by 2020.
The eventual market for the complex disease, formally known as Non-alcoholic Steatohepatitis, is forecast to be $20 billion to $35 billion as populations with fatty diets increasingly fall victim to a condition with no approved treatments.
With intense competition and pricing pressure eroding sales of medicines for diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and other lucrative disease categories, and an already crowded field for developmental cancer drugs, big pharma sees NASH as an enormous new market for future profit that will accelerate a wave of deal making.
“We are actively looking on the outside for opportunities... to complement our internal program,” Morris Birnbaum, chief scientific officer for internal medicine for Pfizer, told Reuters.
Pfizer currently has three early-stage drugs in the clinic aiming to block or reverse fat accumulation in the liver. “We believe that even though we’re a bit behind, we still might come out with the best-in-class molecules,”Mr Birnbaum said. Bristol-Myers Squibb also confirmed it is looking for additional assets to enhance its internally-developed NASH drugs. It presented promising data for its lead NASH candidate at the big European liver meeting in Amsterdam that ended on Sunday.
“It’s early days, but keep your seatbelts fastened,” said Dr Scott Friedman, dean for therapeutic discovery at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York and one of the world’s leading liver disease experts.
Estimates for the prevalence of NASH in nations with fatty diets range from 5 to 20 per cent of the population with up to 15 million potentially affected in the US alone.
Driven by the obesity and diabetes epidemics, the disease guarantees an enormous pool of patients for decades, making it a prime target for deals for promising therapies for NASH and its consequences — advanced fibrosis and liver-destroying cirrhosis. The very early stages of many of the drugs, and the complicated nature of the disease itself, pose risks for drug developers and their investors alike.
But the upside potential is still enticing to Raghuram Selvaraju, managing director and senior healthcare analyst at Rodman and Renshaw.
He calls NASH one of the hottest spaces in the healthcare sector.
“We anticipate that there will be more transactions, more licensing deals from big pharma involving emerging biotechnology companies,” he said. Just a few years ago, Gilead Sciences was the lone large drugmaker talking about NASH. It was undeterred after its most advanced anti-fibrosis candidate failed, striking deals with two small companies to acquire additional NASH programs. Liver disease experts were impressed last year by Phase II data from a Gilead-developed drug that demonstrated fibrosis regression after just six months.
Allergan became a top NASH contender with its acquisition of Tobira Therapeutics and a deal with private Akarna Therapeutics on the same day last year.
Other big drugmakers with licensing deals or options on future deals in the space include Novartis, Merck & Co, Bristol-Myers and Johnson & Johnson.
