If you're a football fan (or, as you insist on calling it in the US, a soccer fan), you already know the summer transfer window is about to close, and across Europe's top clubs the familiar panic has set in. The clubs that planned ahead are adding quality from a position of strength. The ones that did not are about to overpay for players they do not quite need, just to avoid going into the season short.
Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are playing out the same dynamic in biopharma this week, just with far higher stakes than a backup left back.
Novo’s Difficult Week
It has been a bruising few days for Novo Nordisk. In the space of a week, the Danish drugmaker absorbed two clinical setbacks, reported quarterly earnings that underwhelmed on the obesity line, and watched its CEO spend most of the results call reassuring investors rather than building on momentum.
The first blow for Novo came on July 31 as its bet on inflammation as the next frontier in heart disease failed a key test with its IL-6 inhibitor, ziltivekimab, missing the mark in reducing major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in the Phase III ZEUS trial.
While the antibody demonstrated target engagement and inhibition of the IL-6 pathway, it did not translate into any improvements on MACE risk reductions (hazard ratio, 0.99; 95% confidence interval, 0.88 to 1.11) in the 6,300-patient trial, Novo reported.