AstraZeneca, whose COVID vaccine has still not been approved in the US, is on the hunt to buy small and mid-sized companies specialising in oncology and cardiovascular treatments, says chief executive Pascal Soriot last week, showing how quickly fortunes have changed for the drugmaker that produced one of the first COVID-19 shots but has since lost out to rivals.
Production delays, probes by regulators after rare cases of severe side effects, and concerns about its relatively short shelf life compared with other shots all stymied adoption of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine, reports Reuters.
On the future of its COVID vaccines business, Soriot said: “I can’t be sure we will be there or not,” adding that he wasn’t whether AstraZeneca would broaden its roster of vaccines for other infections either, but the company was looking into it.
In this third year of the pandemic amid a global vaccine supply glut, vaccine use has shrunk in much of the developed world as countries have inoculated large numbers of people and prefer Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines as boosters.
The London-listed company is building on its portfolio of antibody therapies, including for COVID-19, the respiratory virus RSV and other viruses, Soriot said.
The company created a separate division for vaccines and antibody therapies late last year.
Still, Soriot said he did not regret the company’s work with Oxford University to develop a COVID vaccine, given they had delivered billions of doses and saved an estimated 6m lives across the globe.
The inoculation was AstraZeneca’s second best-selling product in 2021 with sales of $3.9bn.
AstraZeneca is now looking for the acquisition of small and mid-sized companies specialising in oncology and cardiovascular treatments, Soriot added.
Soriot was tasked with turning around a troubled AstraZeneca – hit by a string of key patent losses and clinical trial failures – in October 2012, after a stint at pharma peer Roche.
With him in the driver’s seat, the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker’s fortunes changed dramatically. He sharpened focus on speciality medicines and oncology, made acquisitions to refill the company’s medicine cabinet, fended off a hostile takeover from pharma giant Pfizer, and invested heavily in R&D to improve the company’s lacklustre drug development success rate.
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