Mazdutide

Pfizer has recently gone shopping for investigational GLP-1 drugs in China to take them to the rest of the world. Now, the large drugmaker is going to China and staying there. The New York pharma giant is paying up to $495 million to get the China commercialization rights to an approved GLP-1 injectable from Sciwind Biosciences, the Hangzhou-based drug developer said on Tuesday. The companies didn’t disclose the split between upfront, regulatory and milestone payments. Pfizer will be competing with Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly and Innovent in the Chinese market. The move comes a month after China’s drug regulator approved Sciwind’s GLP-1 receptor agonist, known as ecnoglutide, for adults with type 2 diabetes. The regulator is also reviewing the medicine for obesity. Ecnoglutide is also in clinical testing for a broad set of indications, including MASH, obstructive sleep apnea and other comorbidities. Pfizer has made obesity one of the core fixtures of its pipeline, alongside cancer, for the next decade. Attempting to move beyond its Covid-19 vaccine days, Pfizer duked it out with Wegovy maker Novo Nordisk last year in a bidding war for obesity biotech Metsera. It’s on the hook for up to $10 billion to Metsera shareholders and has outlined plans to start 10 Phase 3 trials this year for PF-08653944, the long-acting GLP-1 injectable from that deal. Weeks after buying Metsera, Pfizer supplemented that deal with a $150 million upfront pact for an oral GLP-1 medicine from China-based YaoPharma , a Fosun subsidiary. With Sciwind, Pfizer is getting immediate access to an approved medicine that it can sell in China, where about 148 million people have diabetes, according to the International Diabetes Federation. Ecnoglutide is one of a handful of approved GLP-1 medicines in China, joining Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide, Lilly’s tirzepatide and Innovent’s mazdutide. Sciwind will continue leading R&D, registration, manufacturing and supply of the drug in China, it said. In 2024, China’s government launched a three-year weight management campaign to address the rising rates of obesity in the world’s second most populous country. Pfizer’s China president Jean-Christophe Pointeau said in a statement that 14.1% of Chinese adults have obesity. The Sciwind deal, he said, “represents an important milestone in accelerating Pfizer’s long-term strategic expansion in the metabolic field.” Sciwind CEO Pan Hai told Reuters last July that Sciwind was in talks with an unnamed US company interested in ecnoglutide for American patients. It’s unclear whether he was referring to Pfizer, since Pfizer did not pick up the US rights to the drug. Sciwind filed for an IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange a few months after that Reuters report to help bankroll its sprawling pipeline. Western biotech Verdiva Bio has rights to a once-weekly oral version of ecnoglutide, along with oral and injectable amylin candidates from Sciwind.