In an effort to grow its presence in China, U.S. biotech giant Amgen has partnered with China’s Fosun Pharma to bring Otezla and Parsabiv to patients in the country.
Amgen China will out-license the two drugs to Fosun, in hopes the collaboration will allow its products to reach more psoriasis and chronic kidney disease patients in the country of more than 1.4 billion people. Meanwhile, Wu Yifang, the chairman of Fosun, said in a statement that Chinese patients have an “urgent need” for better treatment options.
Otezla won approval from the National Medical Products Administration of China last August. The medicine is the first and only oral phosphodiesterase 4 inhibitor for the treatment of plaque psoriasis in China, a disease affecting 6.5 million patients in the country.
Parsabiv, approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the FDA in 2016 and 2017, respectively, is still in a regulatory review in China.
Amgen established a presence in China back in 2012. Its Shanghai headquarters enables its operations in 100 cities across the country. The company bought Otezla in 2019 from Celgene for $13.4 billion in a bid to grow its revenues and expand its inflammation franchise.
As for Fosun Pharma, the company set up a joint venture with BioNTech last year to produce up to 1 billion doses of its COVID-19 mRNA shots in China. At the time, the duo expected Chinese approval for the vaccine to come in July. As of May, the vaccine has yet to receive approval.
Growth in China has been hard to come by lately. Last year, AstraZeneca’s CEO Pascal Soriot told investors to expect slower growth in the country, saying while the company can continue to grow, it’s going to be “more difficult moving forward.” China’s volume-based procurement initiative, a price-cutting program that targets off-patent drugs, threatened more than $1 billion in annual sales for older AstraZeneca products. AZ’s sales dropped by 8% in the Chinese market in the first quarter of 2022 compared with the same period last year.