Mer­ck KGaA’s Baven­cio no longer 'alone' in blad­der can­cer mar­ket, but growth op­por­tu­ni­ty re­mains

Mer­ck KGaA’s Baven­cio will face its first com­peti­tor in first-line blad­der can­cer in the form of Seagen and Astel­las’ Pad­cev plus Mer­ck’s Keytru­da, but the high cost of the com­bi­na­tion could help Baven­cio main­tain its growth tra­jec­to­ry, CFO He­lene von Roed­er said in a third-quar­ter me­dia re­sults call.

The Ger­man con­glom­er­ate’s health­care sales were up 7% to €2.06 bil­lion ($2.2 bil­lion) in Q3, sup­port­ed by the growth of its on­col­o­gy fran­chise. In par­tic­u­lar, Baven­cio sales grew 22% to €185 mil­lion ($197 mil­lion) in its first full quar­ter af­ter Pfiz­er re­turned the com­mer­cial rights to Mer­ck KGaA in March, end­ing a part­ner­ship of al­most 10 years.

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