Coherus sells Sandoz its Lucentis biosimilar for $170M to focus on oncology assets 

Co­herus Bio­Sciences is sell­ing its FDA-ap­proved oph­thal­mol­o­gy biosim­i­lar Cimer­li — a copy­cat ver­sion of Roche’s Lu­cen­tis — to San­doz for $170 mil­lion in cash to fo­cus on its on­col­o­gy pipeline.

“This di­vesti­ture will al­low us to re­duce our head­count and over­head costs, en­hanc­ing our sus­tain­able and grow­ing on­col­o­gy busi­ness,” Co­herus CEO Den­ny Lan­fear said in a re­lease on Mon­day.

The di­vesti­ture, which marks San­doz’s first deal since spin­ning out of No­var­tis, is ex­pect­ed to close in the first half of the year and in­cludes Cimer­li’s bi­o­log­ics li­cense ap­pli­ca­tion, com­mer­cial soft­ware, as well as the drug’s sales and field re­im­burse­ment teams. San­doz will al­so get the “sup­port­ing com­mer­cial in­fra­struc­ture” of Cimer­li, with an ad­di­tion­al pay­ment for oth­er prod­uct in­ven­to­ry to fol­low.

Unlock this article instantly by becoming a free subscriber.

You’ll get access to free articles each month, plus you can customize what newsletters get delivered to your inbox each week, including breaking news.