Roche Holding AG will work together with Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. on a potential treatment for high blood pressure in a deal worth as much as $2.8 billion, expanding the Swiss company’s footprint beyond the cancer therapies that long anchored its business.
Roche will pay Alnylam $310 million in cash upfront, together with development, regulatory and sales milestones, the companies said in statements on Monday. If they’re successful in bringing the drug to market, they’ll sell it together in the US while Roche gets exclusive rights in the rest of the world.
Pressure is growing on Roche to deliver results from its pipeline of experimental drugs after high-profile failures last year in both cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. The company has reshaped its portfolio amid biosimilar competition for its trio of blockbuster cancer medicines.
“We do believe that it has best in disease potential in a very large market,” Teresa Graham, Roche’s pharmaceuticals chief, said of the Alnylam drug, zilebesiran.
Given as an injection, it uses RNAi technology to block production of angiotensinogen, a protein that plays a key role in raising blood pressure, in the liver. It’s in mid-stage human trials after delivering promising results in an early study, published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine. Almost half of patients with high blood pressure aren’t able to lower it to target levels using existing medicines, according to the journal.
In the early-stage study, the experimental shot’s effects lingered over 24 weeks, meaning the drug could potentially be given about every six months.
Roche expects readouts from two mid-stage trials of zilebesiran by early next year and plans to start a third mid-stage trial, Graham said. The company would make a decision about a late-stage clinical program at that point, she said, but anticipates that a large study to determine whether the drug can not only lower blood pressure but improve outcomes for patients would probably be needed.
Roche shares rose as much as 0.8% on Monday. Investors are waiting for final results from Roche’s experimental lung cancer drug tiragolumab, Oddo analysts said in a note, adding that they expected the company to add to its experimental pipeline more in cancer than in cardiovascular disease.
(Updates with executive comment from the fourth paragraph)
