RE:RE:Novartis Sells Shares Back to Roche for $20.7 Billion Novartis' sale of Roche means the group will soon have $20.7bn to make strategic acquisitions of other biopharmaceuticals. And there could be more to come, if Novartis sells Sandoz – something that Novartis signalled after it started a recent strategic review of the generic business.
What we know is that Novartis has stated that it is looking at bolt-ons deals but hasn't advertised its intention, notwithstanding its expanding interests. So, what could Novartis buy with the cash?
In oncology, the likes of Exelixis or Incyte could be safe possibility given that Novartis is already partnered with Incyte, for example, even though Novartis recently in-licensed BeiGene’s PD-1 inhibitor tislelizumab, which would compete with Roche’s PD-L1 inhibitor atezolizumab (Tecentriq) as well as Incyte's PD-1 inhibitor retifanlimab.
Also with Novartis’s interest in the likes of Car-T and gene therapy, gene editing could be on its radar, which would expand Novartis' capabilities to both autologous and allogeneic cell therapies.
Radiopharmaceuticals is another proposition as the Swiss pharma giant is clearly a believer in the technology’s potential. Hence the Endocyte buyout, and that of Advanced Accelerator Applications, for $3.9bn, in 2017. While radiopharmaceuticals have shown promise in early studies, they are also, as is the case with other types of cancer drugs, unlikely to wipe out a tumor on their own.
Using radiopharmaceuticals in combination with other therapies may be one way to drive that improvement in radiopharmaceuticals, since radiation therapy may also make the tumor microenvironment more hospitable to immune cells and IO therapies. This notwithstanding, while doctors can use imaging to measure exactly how much of a radiopharmaceutical has reached a tumor, almost in real time, and adjust the dose accordingly, treatment planning requires multidisciplinary expertise that isn’t widely available and has left people using radiopharmaceuticals more as “radioactive chemotherapy,” with a one-size-fits-all dose", which means that many patients aren’t [yet] getting optimal treatment.
Therefore, combining radiation with ONCY's oncolytic virus may further serve to overturn an immunosuppressive TME particularly given that ONCY has already demonstrated that pelareorep is capable to overcoming a hostile TME and that combining pelareorep with radiation can kill remote cancers through the abscopal effect, when radiation + pelareorep is delivered locally through intratumoral injection. The addition of ONCY's pelareorep with checkpoint inhibitors and/or CDK4,5 or PARP inhibitors with radiation is another possibility for application.
In viewing the above, ONCY's pelareorep appears to be rather closely aligned with many of Novartis' interests, and further expands the scope of influence that ONCY has been developing with its current partners Merck KGAa/Pfizer, Roche/Genentech, and Incyte, for example, thus making ONCY an attractive candidate for an acquisition by other big biopharma companies, like Novartis.