Novartis
NEWS
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s HHS nomination moves to a full Senate vote; Donald Trump’s tariff war sparks China-related concerns for biopharma; Pfizer, Merck and more announce Q4 and 2024 earnings; and the non-opioid painkiller space heats up as FDA approves Vertex’s Jounavx.
Faced with the encroaching threats of patent expirations and generics, biopharma companies in 2024 invested 33% more in licensing deals, on average, than in 2023 with an eye toward enriching their pipelines with novel and potentially more effective therapies.
Novartis was among the most prolific pharma dealmakers in 2024, a trend that it expects to continue with more bolt-on deals this year to set up for sustainable long-term growth.
The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference started off with a flurry of deals that reinvigorated excitement across the biopharma industry. Johnson & Johnson moved to acquire Intra-Cellular Therapies for $14.6 billion, breaking a dealmaking barrier that kept Big Pharma’s 2024 biotech buyouts to under $5 billion.
Novartis is locked in a legal back-and-forth with MSN Pharma over alleged patent infringement of its heart failure drug Entresto.
The closures follow Novartis’s acquisition of MorphoSys earlier this year.
The report comes just two days after Novartis announced its own Parkinson’s drug failure.
The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review flagged five drugs whose prices were raised in 2023 with no evidence to support it. Meanwhile, the makers of these drugs have been reporting double-digit sales growth for many of these products.
Pfizer, facing increasing pressure from Novartis, is touting a Phase III win for Ibrance as the first clinical evidence supporting the CDK4/6 inhibitor class’ use in patients with a specific type of breast cancer.
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