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 The company also brought forward the filing date for a new lung
cancer pill, and said it could win between eight and 10 new
approvals in 2015-2016 for drugs dealing with a wide range of
diseases.
Neil Woodford, a top-20 shareholder who left Invesco earlier this
year to set up Woodford Investment Management, said his belief in
the drugmaker's independent prospects was "even stronger" after the
update. AstraZeneca is his biggest holding.
The company's work on immune-boosting cancer treatments is advancing
especially fast, Chief Executive Pascal Soriot said, meaning it can
now formally add it as a sixth growth business ahead of the new
drugs reaching the market.
AstraZeneca's five existing growth platforms of heart drug Brilinta,
diabetes, respiratory medicine, emerging markets and Japan currently
make up more than half of its revenue.
"Oncology is going to become rapidly a growth platform for us,"
Soriot told reporters.
Although AstraZeneca has more drugs coming through, it still faces
major challenges, with a raft of patent expiries over the next few
years, and Soriot said he would continue to seek partnerships and
bolt-on acquisitions to build the business.
Many analysts remain sceptical about the company's ability to
deliver on its previously announced long-term targets - a return to
revenue growth by 2017 and annual sales up by three quarters to
exceed $45 billion by 2023 - but consensus forecasts have increased
in the past six months.
ANOTHER PFIZER APPROACH?
Executives from AstraZeneca will present further details of its new
drugs to investors at a six-hour meeting later on Tuesday.
The event comes eight days before British takeover rules allow
Pfizer to renew its pursuit, an option some investors now see as
unlikely after the U.S. company signed a major cancer drug deal with
Germany's Merck KGaA on Monday that reduced its need for
AstraZeneca's products.
Soriot said it was "hard to comment" on the read-across from
Pfizer-Merck tie-up.
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Woodford said he thought there remained a 50/50 chance of Pfizer
approaching AstraZeneca again, despite new U.S. curbs on the kind of
tax-cutting deal Pfizer had planned to do, since the U.S. firm still
needed to replenish its medicine chest despite the Merck deal.
"Pfizer doesn’t really have a pipeline of new drugs but AstraZeneca
does," he said.
Most AstraZeneca investors have focused their interest on its cancer
drug portfolio, particularly immuno-oncology where it has 13
combination trials underway and 16 planned.
It is also making rapid progress with a new pill against lung
cancer, called AZD9291, which is now expected to be filed for U.S.
approval in the second quarter of 2015.
Previously, the filing date was the second-half of next year and the
acceleration means the drug will have gone from first tests in
humans to regulatory submission in a record time of just over two
years.
AstraZeneca is in a race with U.S. biotech company Clovis Oncology,
which is developing a similar medicine.
Scientists at the British drugmaker also plan to move several more
experimental cancer medicines into clinical testing to boost the
immune system's ability to fight tumours in novel ways.
(Editing by Sophie Walker)
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