AstraZeneca CEO Soriot bets up to $7B on a major league collaboration for a game-changing HER2 cancer drug
After years of out-licensing, product sales and whatever else it took to float the sinking AstraZeneca ship, CEO Pascal Soriot is now a buyer. And he’s going big.
Thursday night, Soriot announced that AstraZeneca is paying Daiichi Sankyo $1.35 billion upfront to partner on trastuzumab deruxtecan, an antibody drug conjugate for HER2 expressing cancers. Half arrives with the signing, the other half in a year. And Soriot is adding up to $5.55 billion more in development and commercial milestones, for a total of $6.9 billion, one of the largest pacts the company has ever struck.
Pascal Soriot in Washington, DC, February 2019 Getty
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