Duxipent more and more lucrative
Sanofi achieves success in COPD treatment
03/23/2023, 5:13 p.m
The remedy Dupixent shows success in seven diseases. In the most recent study, all goals in the treatment of the smoking disease COPD were achieved. This opens up further billions in revenue for the French company Sanofi – and at the same time increases the sales dependency on one product.
The French pharmaceutical company Sanofi can hope for additional billions in revenue with its blockbuster drug Duxipent. The drug, which is already approved for use in neurodermatitis and asthma, achieved all the targets in a clinical study on the treatment of smoker’s lungs, as Sanofi announced. In the pivotal phase 3 study, Duxipent resulted in a 30 percent reduction in acute disease worsening (exacerbations) in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The drug also achieved an improvement in lung function, quality of life and COPD respiratory symptoms. It is the seventh disease for which Dupixent has shown positive results, Sanofi said.
According to Sanofi, Duxipent could thus become the first biotechnologically produced drug for the treatment of COPD. “COPD is an urgent global health problem and, due to its heterogeneity, a notoriously difficult to treat disease for which no new therapies have been approved for more than a decade,” said George Yancopoulos, chief research officer at US biotech company Regeneron, with which Sanofi is co-developing Duxipent.
COPD is a progressive and currently incurable lung disease in which the airways become inflamed and narrowed over time. Smoking is a major risk factor for COPD, but people who quit smoking can still develop the disease.
JP Morgan analyst Richard Vosser spoke of “groundbreaking data”. The current market expectation of Duxipents sales of 15.7 billion euros in 2027 could thus probably be exceeded by up to two billion. According to the study results, Sanofi shares rose by almost five percent on the Paris Stock Exchange.
The data underscores the great potential of Duxipent, but also reinforces Sanofi’s dependence on its blockbuster. Sales of the anti-inflammatory drug increased by 44 percent to 8.3 billion euros last year, accounting for almost a fifth of total revenue. So far, the group had assumed that Duxipent could achieve sales of up to 13 billion euros in its best year as the company tries to expand the use of the drug to various inflammatory diseases. So far, however, COPD has not been included in this sales target. Sanofi has not yet issued a new forecast.
Acquisition in the diabetes business
The French had recently announced their intention to strengthen the diabetes business with the $2.9 billion takeover of the US biotech company Provention Bio. With the deal, Sanofi secures access to a new drug from the Americans for the treatment of type 1 diabetes. The drug was launched last year in the US as the first and only treatment to delay the onset of stage 3 type 1 diabetes in adults — which affects around 65,000 people annually — and stage 2 children ages eight and older, according to Sanofi admitted to the disease.
Sanofi expects the transaction to close in the second quarter. The company, which dominated the insulin market for almost two decades, has been struggling with high price pressure in the diabetes business for years. At the end of 2019, Sanofi therefore announced that it would stop research in the field of diabetes because it was becoming increasingly difficult to develop groundbreaking innovations.
Thanks to the weak European currency, Sanofi had increased its income by almost 14 percent to almost 43 billion euros last year. All in all, profits climbed by eight percent to 6.7 billion euros in the reporting period. All in all, things went better than expected at the beginning of the year, and the Management Board raised its targets several times. Sanofi proposed increasing the dividend for 2022 by 6.9 percent to €3.56 per share.