Roche said that its future dealmaking could be impacted by potential tariffs on pharmaceuticals.
“If there are questions around tariffs, it will be more difficult to make financial sense of any M&A deals,” the Swiss company’s CEO Thomas Schinecker said on a media call to discuss its
first-quarter earnings
Thursday.
He added that this was not a Roche-specific issue. “My assumption would be that you will see an industry-wide situation where people probably reduce the [M&A] efforts at this stage,” he said.
But the company is certainly not ruling out future deals, even in its metabolic unit, which recently saw a
major partnership
with the Danish biotech Zealand Pharma.
“With the acquisition of Carmot and the partnership with Zealand, we’re feeling very good about our entry into the cardiovascular and metabolism space,” Teresa Graham, the CEO of Roche’s pharmaceuticals division, said on the call. “Are we done? I think we’re never a company that’s done.”
She said that Roche would pursue both internal R&D and inorganic development, and was “always going to be on the hunt for what’s next.”
Including Zealand’s amylin product petrelintide, Roche has five molecules in clinical development for obesity or diabetes. One of the rationales for the Zealand tie-up was that petrelintide could be combined with the incretin drugs Roche obtained via its
2023 acquisition
of Carmot, and Roche disclosed Thursday that a mid-stage study of the amylin in combination with the injected GLP-1/GIP agonist CT-388 would begin early next year.
Separately, Zealand
said
Thursday that it had kicked off a Phase 2b study of petrelintide as a monotherapy in patients with obesity and type 2 diabetes. Data could come in 2026.
Overall, Roche is working hard to limit any potential damage from tariffs that might be imposed, in the US or elsewhere. Schinecker said that four of Roche’s products make up “potentially 92%” of
possible tariff exposure
, though he declined to specify which four these were.
The sweeping changes at US healthcare agencies have had little effect on the pharma business so far, Graham said. “Obviously we’re watching very closely the evolutions within HHS and FDA. At this time, we are not seeing any slowdown either in development or approval processes,” she said, calling the situation “business as usual.”
In reference to
a letter
written by the CEOs of Novartis and Sanofi to the
Financial Times
this week, Schinecker said that the EU could make political changes to speed new medicines to market. He said there is “too much bureaucracy” in the EU, and cutting this would be important if the EU wants to accelerate economic growth, on which it has lagged the US and China for many years.
Increasing investment in the biopharma sector “is something where Europe can definitely improve on,” he said, adding that there are some approved medicines more easily accessed in other parts of the world than in parts of Europe.
He added that there are aspects of US healthcare that also need to be addressed. “If you look at the price of a medicine in the US, only 50% of the cost of medicine actually goes to the inventor, and 50% go to other players, like pharma benefit managers, insurers, etc.,” he said.
Roche’s pharma business grew by 8% at constant exchange rates to CHF11.9 billion ($14.4 billion), with the breast cancer drug Phesgo and the eye disease product Vabysmo as the top growth drivers.