AstraZeneca Plc said Valeant Pharmaceuticals global Inc. agreed to buy the commercial rights to brodalumab, picking up the collaboration on the psoriasis treatment after Amgen Inc. dropped out in May. The shares have lost some 10 percent of their value over the past year.
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Valeant agreed to assume all development costs associated with the regulatory approval for brodalumab.
AstraZeneca said applications seeking approval to market brodalumab as a treatment for moderate-to-severe psoriasis with the Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency are planned for late this year.
Valeant said it will make an up-front payment of $100 million to AstraZeneca, and additional pre-launch milestone payments of up to $170 million and sales-related milestone payments of up to $175 million following launch.
“Our agreement will help to bring brodalumab to patients with psoriasis”, said Pascal Soriot, chief executive officer of AstraZeneca.
Psoriasis is an autoimmune disease that causes a red, scaly rash and flaky skin.
Brodalumab is “potentially the most efficacious therapy yet for moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis”, said J. Michael Pearson, Valeant Chairman and CEO.
The transaction is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2015, subject to customary closing conditions.
Brodalumab is a unit of IL-17 inhibitor drugs.
Brodalumab is a type of antibody that works by attaching to certain receptors in the body and blocking signals that can lead to inflammation. (NYSE/TSX:VRX) is a multinational specialty pharmaceutical company that develops, manufactures and markets a broad range of pharmaceutical products primarily in the areas of dermatology, gastrointestinal disorder, eye health, neurology and branded generics.
“It’s very Valeant-esque in many ways”, Evercore ISI analyst Umer Raffat wrote of the brodalumab deal in an email to clients.
Amgen originally developed brodalumab and was studying it with AstraZeneca.
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What Valeant’s press release didn’t mention is that AstraZeneca’s previous partner in brodalumab, Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN), had abandoned the program back in May when several patients in the clinical trials killed themselves. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof.
