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Roche is to acquire anti-obesity drug developer Carmot Therapeutics for up to $3.1bn, as the Swiss pharmaceutical group joins the industry’s charge into the fast-growing market for weight loss treatments
The company on Monday said it would pay Carmot shareholders $2.7bn in cash when the deal closes in the first quarter of 2024, plus a further $400mn depending on milestones.
Through the deal, Basel-based Roche will acquire exclusive rights to a number of assets based on the GLP-1 treatment for obesity in patients with and without diabetes.
Shares in companies such as Novo Nordisk have risen strongly on booming demand for obesity treatments based on the same technology. Currently available treatments are administered only as injections, while Carmot’s experimental molecules are both injectable and suitable for use in pill form. The latter, researchers hope, will be cheaper to make and distribute, and less likely to cause side effects.
Other majors in the field include Eli Lilly, which recently had a treatment approved in the US, and AstraZeneca and Pfizer, both of which are pursuing oral obesity treatments.
Analysts believe that achieving the same efficacy as injectable treatments will be difficult — Pfizer suffered a trial setback on its pill last week — but Roche said on Monday it believed Carmot’s assets had “best-in-class potential to achieve and maintain weight loss with differentiated efficacy”, as well as the ability to be combined with other drugs it is developing.
As part of the merger agreement, Roche will also acquire Carmot’s “Chemotype Evolution” drug discovery platform for metabolic and cardiovascular diseases.
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