Five years after Shire deal, Takeda hopes to reap rewards of latest reinvention

2024-01-19

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Five years ago this month, Takeda Pharmaceuticals completed a $62 billion acquisition of Shire — one of the largest deals in pharmaceutical industry history. The anniversary has resurfaced scrutiny over the buyout’s value and mixed results.

The addition of Shire grew the footprint of Japan’s largest pharma, helping it expand into European and U.S. markets. It also bolstered Takeda’s pipeline and funneled more R&D investment toward vaccines and plasma-derived therapies. And while the company took on about $60 billion in debt to complete the acquisition, Takeda used divestitures to lower its debt burden and exceeded its predicted cost savings a year ahead of schedule.

Yet, for all those benefits, Reuters reported in December how the megadeal hasn’t delivered value to Takeda’s shareholders and showcases the risk of high-profile megamergers. And when PharmaVoice sat down with Chris Arendt, the company’s chief scientific officer, at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this month, Takeda was emerging from a fresh cycle of up-and-down news.

In October, the company said it was pulling Exkivity, a lung cancer drug, from the market after the treatment failed a confirmatory trial.

“As challenging and heartbreaking as that is, it’s kind of how drug development plays out,” Arendt said. “That’s the reality — there will be ups and downs.”

Weeks later, the company reduced its full-year profit forecast by 36% in the face of pipeline setbacks and patent expirations for major drugs like the ADHD medicine Vyvanse.

Yet in November, Takeda won Food and Drug Administration approval of fruquintinib for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer that has been previously treated. Fruquintinib is one of the key drug the company’s CEO said would help it rebound in the coming years. At JPM, Arendt was upbeat about the future of Takeda’s pipeline.

“Takeda is in a really good place,” he said. “We are where we want to be this far out from the Shire deal in terms of capabilities and R&D strategies.”

Living on the edge

Arendt came to Takeda from Sanofi in 2015, first as head of immunology, before later leading the oncology cell therapy and therapeutic area unit. As he kicked off his career at Takeda, Arendt, who took over as CSO in October, said the company was embarking “in earnest” to reshape its therapeutic pipeline and focus on three core areas: neuroscience, gastrointestinal disorders and oncology.

In recent years, the company has also leaned into vaccine and PDT development while branching out into new modalities and pursuing partnerships that support those efforts.

In particular, Arendt pointed to its $4 billion purchase of Nimbus Therapeutics’ TYK2 drug in 2022, which delivered positive topline results from a Phase 2b study for psoriatic arthritis in September. The selective TYK2 inhibitor TYK2 inhibitor could target multiple immune-mediated inflammatory conditions and, if approved, would go head-to-head with Bristol Myers Squibb’s TYK2 inhibitor TYK2 inhibitor, Sotyktu.

“That’s a program we’re really excited about,” Arendt said.

On the oncology front, Takeda bought Maverick Therapeutics in 2021 to take hold of its T cell engager pipeline, which involves treatments that use a patient’s cells to attack solid tumors.

“We brought in Maverick’s T cell focus and married in with our incredible talents and capabilities to further its potential,” Arendt said. “We love this model of trying to complement what pharma can do at scale with what biotechs do really well.”

Two other acquisitions in the last few years — of GammaDelta Therapeutics and Adaptate Biotherapeutics — have also targeted T cell technologies and fit into Takeda’s strategy of “reinventing” its oncology pipeline and investing in immunotherapy and antibody-based treatments, Arendt said.

Takeda continues to eye other partnerships. “We’re looking at where pioneering science is emerging,” he said. “You can look at what other companies are doing and follow the latest press releases into the latest biological space, but we look at the next step changes, and try to advance what’s cutting edge.”

Takeda’s outlook

None of these changes are to suggest that Takeda is straying completely from its roots in small molecules.

“Any good investment portfolio needs to be balanced to level the risk and we’re always considering that,” Arendt said. “You can look at some of the cutting-edge modalities in cell therapies, but we’re also still interested in small molecules [to create] a balanced portfolio strategy.”

What will all of this amount to in 2024?

“Our transformation was about planting the seeds,” Arendt said. “A lot of our R&D was seeding and now it’s maturing — 2024 is about bearing fruit in terms of clinical readouts.”

This year will also mark an overall shift in Takeda’s pipeline from being “historically weighted toward earlier-stage programs to having more in later-stage development,” Arendt said.

With the launch of newly approved drugs underway, the TYK2 drug moving into Phase 3 trials, a drug development engine that’s churning hard — the company recorded $4.8 billion in R&D investments in 2022 — and an eye out for new partnership opportunities, Takeda isn’t done with its latest reinvention.

“We’ll surprise you with more deals you may not have seen coming,” Arendt said.