Amgen Joins Pact Targeting Blood-Related Diseases : Biotechnology: The Thousand Oaks firm has teamed with a start-up company to try to develop new drugs.
Amgen Inc., the biotechnology giant in Thousand Oaks, is collaborating with a fledgling Northern California company on developing new drug treatments for blood-related disorders.
The four-year pact announced Monday between Amgen and Sugen Inc., based in Redwood City, calls for the companies to jointly develop and market any drugs they can commercialize, and to then share the profits.
Amgen also purchased a 10% equity stake in privately held Sugen. Although Amgen’s total investment was not announced, it reportedly is about $10 million.
The agreement is only the latest of several collaborations between small biotechnology companies that have promising research and larger entities that have the financial and manufacturing muscle to help turn the research into commercial products.
Amgen already has invested more than $18 million in Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., a Tarrytown, N.Y.-based concern that’s working on drugs to combat Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological ailments.
“It’s just a way for Amgen to get into new, exciting technologies,” said Evan Sturza, publisher of Sturza’s Medical Investment Letter in New York. “They can do only so much on their own.”
Amgen has extended its helping hand to other companies while it continues working on a successor drug to its two products now on the market: Epogen, which stimulates red blood cell production to fight chronic anemia in patients with kidney disease, and Neupogen, which spurs white blood cell output to help cancer patients fight infections.
Amgen, with revenue of $785 million in the first nine months of 1992, is doing clinical research on various other drugs itself.
But even if any are approved for sale, it will probably be several years before the company brings another one to market.
“They’re trying to figure out what they’re going to do once they saturate the market with those two drugs, so they’re making several venture capital-type investments,” Sturza said.
Sugen is trying to develop drugs that would stimulate the production of platelets, a key component in the blood that is sometimes low after a patient gets chemotherapy or suffers an immune-system disorder.
Sugen is trying to produce the drugs by targeting “receptors” on the surface of cells that are involved in certain diseases.
Once found, Sugen hopes to produce molecules that would bind with the receptors and so curb the illnesses.
Sugen Chairman Stephen Evans-Freke said in a statement that the challenge for the Sugen-Amgen team “is to choose from many possible receptor targets the particular receptors” that cause specific diseases.
The drugs to be developed by Sugen and Amgen might presumably be used with Epogen and Neupogen to treat the side effects of chemotherapy (for cancer patients) and anemia (in kidney-disease patients).
Amgen spokeswoman Sarah Crampton said that under one hypothesis, for instance, aSugen-Amgen drug could enable certain patients to safely get higher doses of Neupogen by increasing the platelets in their blood.
