AZD-2693

AstraZeneca on Thursday reported its best-ever quarterly sales figures, driven largely by its oncology portfolio. The drugmaker’s sales between July and September totaled $15.2 billion, up 10% year-on-year at constant exchange rates. This beat analyst expectations by around 2%. AstraZeneca did not raise its 2025 guidance, though, which sits at high single-digit growth in revenue and low double-digit growth in core earnings per share. CEO Pascal Soriot highlighted the moves the company has made in the US during a press call on Thursday morning. These include its pricing deal with AstraZeneca and the US administration, and its decision to list in New York as well as in London. He also touted recent manufacturing investments in the US. The company wouldn’t give specifics on the potential impact of the pricing deal, though CFO Aradhana Sarin said that the “breadth and scope” of its portfolio and its growing revenue base would allow it to “absorb the impact” of the transaction. Soriot denied that AstraZeneca is slowly relocating to the US. “We have been very clear that our domicile is in the … UK,” he said. “Where is your domicile, your tax domicile, your headquarters? That is in the UK, and we’ve been clear on that,” he added. However, he warned that Europe is falling behind the US and China in the innovation race. “When I started in this industry, a lot of innovation was coming out of Europe, and today it’s coming out of the US and China,” Soriot said. “The problem is the future products rely on new technologies that require new manufacturing tools … and those technologies are going to the US, and they’re going to China and other parts of the world.” As a player in obesity, AstraZeneca will be affected from a competitive standpoint by the outcome of Pfizer and Novo Nordisk’s battle to acquire the weight-loss biotech Metsera. Like Metsera, AstraZeneca is developing a potentially long-acting amylin, which ought to post Phase 2 data next year. Metsera’s similar drug is in Phase 1, but development could accelerate if Novo or Pfizer is able to throw their might behind it. AstraZeneca has done a deal of its own in the obesity space. It said Thursday that in late October, it had bought out SixPeaks Bio, a company developing muscle-sparing weight-management drugs. The deal was small, with AstraZeneca spending $170 million on closing, with a further $30 million to come in two years and up to $100 million more tied to regulatory milestones. AstraZeneca invested $15 million in SixPeaks at the end of 2024. Soriot said a key approach to treating complications from obesity is to reduce visceral fat — the fat surrounding patients’ organs, which can increase cardiovascular disease risk. The products SixPeaks is developing aim to do this, though none have yet reached the clinic. These therapies were focused on medical need rather than appearance, Soriot said. “[It] may or may not be acceptable to patients for aesthetic reasons, but what we focus on is not the aesthetic aspect of things — it is really the health, the medical aspects,” he added. However, direct-to-consumer cash sales make up an increasing proportion of obesity drug revenues, so dismissing the aesthetic appeal of so-called skinny jabs might limit sales. Elsewhere, AstraZeneca cut an asset for another metabolic condition, an antisense drug for the liver disease called MASH. AZD2693 was intended to knock down a gene called PNPLA3, but was terminated in Phase 2 due to inadequate efficacy. The company has another MASH drug, a FAP inhibitor, which remains in mid-stage development. The drugmaker also dropped a Takeda-partnered alpha synuclein antibody in multiple system atrophy and Parkinson’s disease, citing lack of efficacy. A KRASG12D inhibitor in solid tumors and an antibody-drug conjugate targeting CD123 and TOP1 for blood cancers were also canned; both were in Phase 1. Other ADCs are moving fast, however. Puxitatug samrotecan (previously called AZD8205), which targets B7-H4, has been put into a pivotal trial in endometrial cancer following strong mid-stage data .