It’s been two years since Take­da’s $62 bil­lion Shire buy­out, and the Tokyo biotech is still re­struc­tur­ing.

The com­pa­ny struck a deal with Ger­many-based Chep­lapharm to di­vest some non-core pre­scrip­tion prod­ucts for an up­front pay­ment of $562 mil­lion. The port­fo­lio — which in­cludes car­dio­vas­cu­lar, meta­bol­ic and an­ti-in­flam­ma­to­ry drugs sold most­ly in Eu­rope and Cana­da — doesn’t fit in with Take­da’s post-Shire vi­sion. The biotech has since shift­ed its fo­cus to gas­troen­terol­o­gy (GI), rare dis­eases, plas­ma-de­rived ther­a­pies, on­col­o­gy and neu­ro­science.

Giles Plat­ford

“These di­vest­ments rep­re­sent an­oth­er im­por­tant mile­stone in our port­fo­lio sim­pli­fi­ca­tion and op­ti­miza­tion strat­e­gy as we po­si­tion Take­da for con­tin­ued suc­cess across our five key busi­ness ar­eas … ” Giles Plat­ford, pres­i­dent of Take­da’s Eu­rope & Cana­da busi­ness unit (EU­CAN), said in a state­ment.

While the Shire buy­out made Take­da a top 10 in­ter­na­tion­al drug com­pa­ny, it al­so sad­dled the com­pa­ny with a re­port­ed $48 bil­lion in net debt. The biotech planned to shed $10 bil­lion in non-core as­sets to bal­ance it out.

Just a few months ago, Take­da an­nounced plans to of­fload some of EU­CAN’s non-core over-the-counter prod­ucts to Ori­farm Group for up to $670 mil­lion. Chep­lapharm, on the oth­er hand, is set to swal­low a port­fo­lio of pre­scrip­tion prod­ucts that gen­er­at­ed $260 mil­lion in net sales last year.

No em­ploy­ees are trans­fer­ring in con­nec­tion with the Chep­lapharm deal, ac­cord­ing to Take­da.

Last month, Take­da en­tered an agree­ment to sell its over-the-counter unit Take­da Con­sumer Health­care Com­pa­ny to US pri­vate eq­ui­ty firm Black­stone Group for about $2.3 bil­lion. It was Take­da’s fourth di­vest­ment deal this year.

In ad­di­tion to the Ori­farm deal, the biotech al­so agreed to di­vest as­sets in the Asia-Pa­cif­ic to Cell­tri­on for up to $278 mil­lion in June; and to Latin-Amer­i­can Hy­pera Phar­ma for $825 mil­lion in March. In Au­gust, Take­da be­gan of­fer­ing ear­ly re­tire­ment to Japan­ese em­ploy­ees.

Take­da ex­pects to close the Chep­lapharm deal by the end of this year.

“While the trust­ed prod­ucts in­clud­ed in the sale ad­dress key pa­tient needs in these coun­tries, they are out­side of our core busi­ness ar­eas of fo­cus. We are con­fi­dent that Chep­lapharm is the right part­ner to en­sure pa­tients con­tin­ue to have ac­cess to these prod­ucts,” CFO Cos­ta Saroukos said in a state­ment.

The top career staff at the FDA have vowed not to let politics get in the way of science when looking at vaccine data this fall. But Alex Azar, who happens to be their boss’s boss, apparently won’t even give them a chance to stand in the way.

In a new memorandum issued Tuesday last week, the HHS chief stripped health agencies under his purview — including the FDA — of their rulemaking ability, asserting all such power “is reserved to the Secretary.” Sheila Kaplan of the New York Times first obtained and reported the details of the September 15 bulletin.

J&J’s one-two punch on EGFR-mutant non-small cell lung cancer has turned up some promising — although decidedly early — results, fueling the idea that there’s yet room to one up on third-generation tyrosine kinase inhibitors.

Twenty out of 20 advanced NSCLC patients had a response after taking a combination of an in-house TKI dubbed lazertinib and amivantamab, a bispecific antibody targeting both EGFR and cMET engineered on partner Genmab’s platform, J&J reported at ESMO. All were treatment-naïve, and none has seen their cancer progress at a median follow-up of seven months.

Late in August, as negotiations on a pricing deal with President Trump reached a boiling point, PhRMA president Stephen Ubl sent an email update to the 34 biopharma chiefs that sit on his board. He wrote that if the industry did not agree to pay for a $100 “cash card” sent to seniors before November, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was going to tell the news media Big Pharma was refusing to “share the savings” with the elderly — and that all of the blame for failed drug pricing negotiations would lie squarely on the industry.