Amgen Shows 3rd-Quarter Loss of $28 Million

Amgen Inc., citing a previously announced $50-million charge, reported a loss of $28 million for its fiscal third quarter compared with a $7.98-million profit a year earlier.

Amgen, a biotechnology concern based in Thousand Oaks, announced Nov. 12 that it paid the $50 million to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York in exchange for a substantial cut in royalties that Amgen would have to pay the center on U.S. sales of a forthcoming biotechnology drug.

The drug is Amgen’s recombinant granulocyte colony-stimulating factor--to be marketed as Neupogen--which helps boost white blood cell production for fighting infection in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Memorial Sloan-Kettering helped with the drug’s initial research. Amgen hopes to start marketing the drug later this year.

Amgen said that without the charge it would have earned $19.7 million in the quarter that ended Dec. 31. Amgen’s third-quarter revenue rose 40% from a year earlier, to $91.2 million from $65.3 million, due to the growing success of the one biotechnology drug it does have on the market, Epogen, which fights anemia in patients with kidney disease.

For the first nine months of its fiscal year, Amgen lost $2.53 million compared with a year-earlier profit of $12.7 million, and its nine-month revenue soared 81%, to $241.7 million from $133.4 million.