San­doz com­pletes $170M buy of Lu­cen­tis biosim­i­lar from Co­herus Bio­Sciences

San­doz’s $170 mil­lion cash deal to buy oph­thal­mol­o­gy biosim­i­lar Cimer­li from Co­herus Bio­Sciences has com­plet­ed ear­ly fol­low­ing its an­nounce­ment in Jan­u­ary.

The deal, which is the first for San­doz since spin­ning off from No­var­tis, in­cludes a bi­o­log­ics li­cense ap­pli­ca­tion, prod­uct in­ven­to­ry and oph­thal­mol­o­gy sales, ac­cord­ing to San­doz.

Cimer­li, a copy­cat ver­sion of Roche’s eye dis­ease drug Lu­cen­tis, brought in $40 mil­lion in the third quar­ter of 2023, a 50% in­crease com­pared to the pri­or quar­ter, ac­cord­ing to Co­herus’ lat­est earn­ings re­port. The biosim­i­lar, an an­ti-VEGF ther­a­py, won ap­proval in Au­gust 2022. It is the on­ly ap­proved ranibizum­ab biosim­i­lar to Roche’s Lu­cen­tis in­jec­tion cov­er­ing the same five eye con­di­tions: wet AMD, di­a­bet­ic retinopa­thy, di­a­bet­ic mac­u­lar ede­ma, mac­u­lar ede­ma fol­low­ing reti­nal vein oc­clu­sion, and my­opic choroidal neo­vas­cu­lar­iza­tion.

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