Amid a reorganization campaign that’s breathed new life into hybrid generic and innovative medicines player Teva, the company is leaning into novel medicines and formulations more than ever and adopting a biotech mindset as it pushes a range of assets through the clinic.
That’s according to Eric Hughes, M.D., Ph.D., Teva’s executive vice president of global R&D and chief medical officer, who arrived in August 2022 to help reinvigorate the company’s generic and innovative drug pipelines, hire on new R&D leadership and spearhead a restructuring of Teva’s research arm.
Since then, Teva has also adopted a new CEO, Richard Francis, and rolled out a revamp strategy dubbed “Pivot to Growth," which has so far been paying off.
During this process, the company hasn’t lost sight of the importance of drug R&D, Hughes explained during a recent interview with Fierce Biotech.
While the interplay between developing copycat drugs and novel therapies and formulations can be tricky, “Teva, given its history and its heritage, is well positioned to be a company that can balance these things very well,” Hughes said.
“Over the last decade, we’ve been working on a very strong pipeline that’s coming to fruition very nicely now,” he added.
Teva’s mid- and late-stage pipeline largely hinges on four drugs, each of which falls into one of the company’s historic specialties in neuroscience and immunology.
There's the company's long-acting injectable formulation of the nearly two-decade-old antipsychotic olanzapine, which Hughes says could offer a more tolerable side effect profile than existing options. Elsewhere, the company is advancing a dual-action rescue inhaler, coded TEV-‘248, which Hughes argues could present “an entirely new treatment paradigm for asthma.”
Besides those two programs, the company is developing the anti-TL1A antibody duvakitug—from which Teva is expecting a phase 2 readout in both ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease toward the end of 2024—and the small molecule emrusolmin for treatment of multiple system atrophy (MSA).
Clinical trial design and execution has been top of mind for Teva under the company’s recent reorganization, Hughes said.
“We completely re-envisioned how fast we can run a study,” he explained. The research leader pointed to the example of Teva’s long-acting olanzapine phase 3 study, which the company accelerated “by nine months.”
And with duvakitug in MSA, which is a “hard population to enroll,” the company has accelerated that trial “by another three to four months,” he added.
Summarizing Teva’s R&D ethos, Hughes explained, “we’re a big company, but we really treat our innovative medicines in a real biotech way.”
“I get down to the nitty-gritty with my teams, I run around the world and use up my shoe leather to make sure that every last effort is made to accelerate and operationalize these studies," he explained.
While neuroscience and immunology are Teva’s bread and butter, “we’re open to rare disease opportunities as well,” Hughes said, suggesting drugs in that category could “fit nicely, potentially, in our footprint at the company.”
These research efforts come amid Teva's yearslong push to source growth from its innovative drug offerings. This year, the company forecasts its innovative franchise will pull down at least $2 billion in sales. Austedo, which treats tardive dyskinesia and chorea associated with Huntington's disease, is expected to generate $1.6 billion. Besides that drug, Teva forecasts its migraine prevention treatment Ajovy will generate at least $500 million in 2024.
Meanwhile, Teva isn't solely looking within for new R&D opportunities.
Speaking at the 2023 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference just days into his tenure as chief executive, Teva's CEO pointed to an "explosion of science" that could present "opportunities for companies to partner with Teva because of our global capability.”
Francis acknowledged that Teva was "constrained" upon his arrival, thanks to tens of billions of dollars in debt accrued over the years, but he stressed at the time that he wanted to emphasize R&D collaborations “a bit more over the next couple of years.”