Despite Pfizer‘s (NYSE: PFE) recent struggles with falling earnings and a bid by an activist investor to unseat its leadership, the pharma juggernaut is still actively advancing its core priorities and giving investors plenty of reasons to consider buying its stock while it’s cheap.
With that in mind, here’s one new initiative that’s worth thinking about if you’re wondering about whether to make an investment.
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On Nov. 20, Pfizer announced that its strategic partnership with Flagship Pioneering, a highly prestigious biopharma venture capital (VC) group, had agreed on a new collaboration.
Per the agreement, one of Flagship’s portfolio companies, a private biotech called Ampersand Biomedicines, will work with Pfizer to potentially develop new medicines for obesity. Given that the market for weight loss drugs could be as large as $100 billion by 2030, there’s little doubt that there’s great potential for these businesses as they work together.
Ampersand’s technology platform aims to streamline the development of multi-component drugs that can localize themselves precisely to the appropriate physiological locations in the patient’s body, perhaps including targeted locations inside specific types of cells, and then deliver a high-impact payload for the intended medicinal effect.
Unlike technologies that are conceptually similar in terms of their goals, such as antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), Ampersand’s technology can supposedly be implemented across a wide range of different therapeutic formats and drug delivery systems, utilizing everything from small molecules to biologics and even nucleic acids like mRNA.
In plain English, this means that the biotech could develop novel approaches to treating obesity and that those novel approaches might end up being significantly more effective than the drugs that are currently on the market or in development elsewhere.
But that’s an ambitious goal. This is not to suggest that its highly flexible multiformat approach is impossible, but in practice it’ll need to tackle a bunch of engineering issues beyond what would normally be expected. It would need to carefully calibrate the physical and chemical interactions between each drug format and each delivery system from scratch — and doing it correctly even for one combination is a very complicated and challenging process.
Even so, don’t get too bearish on the Ampersand-Pfizer collaboration. The pair will have plenty of resources to work with, as well as access to a lot of the best intellectual property (IP) and the talent for developing many of the somewhat disparate biotechnologies in its repertoire. Likewise, the two businesses have a massive trove of biological data to work with, which will certainly improve their odds of success.
At the same time, there is no reason to rush to buy Pfizer’s stock on the basis of this new collaboration. There’s no guarantee that Ampersand’s approach will lead to any new medicines within the next five years or so, even with the help of Pfizer’s formidable research and development (R&D) resources and expert guidance. Presently, there’s no indication that the pair will be launching any new clinical trials anytime soon.
This collaboration is just getting started, and it will likely entail quite a lot of laboratory work as well as extensive pre-clinical testing that probably hasn’t even been envisioned as of yet. Even if they did somehow start actual clinical trials relatively soon, trials can fail or take years to conclude in entirety, so the prospects of anyone making money quickly on the basis of this collaboration are effectively zero.
That means if Pfizer ever does commercialize a drug stemming from this collaboration, it’ll be a very laggardly latecomer to the market for anti-obesity medicines. Thus, it would need to produce a very powerful and/or highly tolerable new medicine if it wanted to secure a significant market share. So, keep an eye out for announcements about any new obesity medicines in the works. Until then, there’s not much reason to update your investment thesis on Pfizer.
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Alex Carchidi has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Pfizer. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
