Roche Holding AG will push for a more productive pipeline of new medicines as a new management team seeks to learn the lessons from recent research setbacks.
(Bloomberg) — Roche Holding AG will push for a more productive pipeline of new medicines as a new management team seeks to learn the lessons from recent research setbacks.
The company aims to move fast on high-risk, high-reward projects, Chief Executive Officer Thomas Schinecker said at a meeting with analysts and investors in London. Roche will also seek deals, he said, looking at potential targets that are already in human trials, typically a pricier class of assets.
“We need to deliver value fast, and that’s the mentality we want in the organization,” Schinecker said on Monday.
The new CEO, who took over in March, is facing the loss of billions of dollars of revenue from Covid-19 tests and treatments even as sales from a trio of cancer medicines that long powered growth continue to erode. At the same time, Roche has had an unusual number of clinical-trial stumbles, including high-profile projects in cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
Once the leader in oncology, Roche is now No. 3 in the market, Schinecker said. Instead, the company is diversifying into more types of diseases.
As it sought new avenues of growth, Roche embarked on too many large late-stage trials — known in the industry as phase 3 tests — without having some run smaller studies to further probe the medicines, the CEO said. In particular in immune oncology, “there was a push to go directly into phase 3 in order to catch up,” he said.
Roche fell as much as 1.4% in Zurich trading. The stock has lagged behind other major European drugmakers this year.
The new management team presented the results of a review of the company’s research and development, a 140-page document, to the board in July. Employees were told about it last week.
“We have some significant growth opportunities ahead,” Teresa Graham, chief of Roche’s pharmaceutical unit, said at the London meeting, pointing to an experimental drug for high blood pressure as well as medicines for eye disorders, multiple sclerosis and hemophilia.
(Updates with Roche shares in seventh paragraph, length of R&D document in eighth)
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