Following last week’s $1.75 billion deal to acquire Xiidra from Novartis, Bausch + Lomb is now buying J&J’s Blink product line in move to boost its over-the-counter eye care portfolio.
Pictured: Woman using eye drops/iStock, stefanamer
To boost its over-the-counter eye care efforts, Bausch + Lomb has acquired eye and contact lens drops under Johnson & Johnson Vision’s Blink product line, the Canadian company announced Thursday.
Bausch + Lomb will pay $106.5 million in cash and receive various Blink products, including the Tears, GelTears and Triple Care lubricating eye drops, as well as the Blink-N-Clean lens drops. The Blink line is designed to provide immediate and durable symptom relief, according to the company’s news announcement.
Johnson & Johnson Vision is a subsidiary company of J&J consisting of two divisions—J&J Surgical Vision and J&J Vision Care—along with its affiliates.
“There’s a growing need for relieving the symptoms of dry eyes and dry contact lenses,” John Ferris, Bausch + Lomb’s executive vice president for consumer, said in a statement, adding that consumers often turn to OTC products first before seeking prescription treatments.
Bausch + Lomb’s Blink buy follows a much larger deal announced last week. The eye care company will buy Novartis’ dry eye drug Xiidra (lifitegrast ophthalmic solution) for $1.75 billion in an upfront cash payment, along with the promise of $750 million in potential milestones. The deal also covers rights to the AcuStream delivery device for dry eye indications, as well as investigational treatments for chronic ocular surface pain.
Approved in 2016, Xiidra is the first medicine authorized by the FDA to treat dry eye disease. The drug is a small molecule antagonist of the LFA-1 integrin, expressed on T cells and which interacts with ICAM-1, a protein typically over-expressed in dry eye disease. This mode of action allows Xiidra to ease the inflammation that gives rise to this condition.
Xiidra was originally developed by Shire, which was bought by Takeda in March 2018. Novartis then acquired the rights to Xiidra in July 2019 for $3.4 billion upfront and up to $1.9 billion in potential milestones. In 2022, Xiidra made Novartis $487 million in sales.
The acquisition of Novartis’ Xiidra and J&J’s Blink product line are only Bausch + Lomb’s latest wins in the dry eye space.
In May 2023, the FDA approved the company’s Miebo (perfluorohexyloctane ophthalmic solution) for the treatment of dry eye disease symptoms. Bausch + Lomb developed Miebo in partnership with Novaliq. Delivered as a single drop into each eye four times a day, Miebo works by forming a thin layer over the tear film, which helps limit the drying of the ocular surface.
Miebo is the first and only FDA-approved drug that directly addresses tear evaporation in dry eye disease, Bausch + Lomb CEO Brent Saunders said in a statement at the time.
Tristan Manalac is an independent science writer based in metro Manila, Philippines. He can be reached at tristan@tristanmanalac.com or tristan.manalac@biospace.com.
