AstraZeneca: Looking To Boost Product Pipeline

AstraZeneca PLC (AZN) will continue to look for deals to boost its drug pipeline, even though it expects that the majority of its new products in 2010 will come from medicines discovered in its own laboratories, its director of development said Tuesday. Drug Pipeline of 600 companies is available at Drug Pipeline Database

Speaking on the sidelines of the Financial Times Global Pharmaceuticals conference in London, John Patterson said that only around 20%-30% of AstraZeneca's drugs will come from in-licensed or acquired products, while the bulk of them will have been developed by the company's own scientists.

However, this doesn't signal that the company is slowing down the search for new products to add to its portfolio, Patterson said.

"We need to be prepared to do more deals," he said. "We are not going to stop looking."

In the last year AstraZeneca has stepped up the number of drugs in its portfolio through licensing deals and the acquisition of Cambridge Antibody Technology, the U.K.'s largest biotech company.

The move was spurred by the failure of a number of previously promising drugs, such as blood thinner Exanta and diabetes treatment Galida.

Patterson noted that AstraZeneca is facing strong competition from its rivals in the search for new products to in-license.

"I don't know of any deals in the last year where we have been on our own," he said.

He also attributed the high prices that such deals have fetched to the sizable cash resources some U.S. drugmakers have accumulated through profit repatriation.

Last week AstraZeneca, the U.K.'s second largest pharmaceutical company by sales, signed a partnership with German drugmaker Bayer-Schering AG to develop new breast cancer treatments.