Arena’s Expanded Marketing Deal with Eisai Has Broad Implications

lorcaserin Belviq

reduce obesity, along with an extended-release formulation of lorcaserin that could be taken once a day, and to explore the drug’s effect on diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

“There remains significant potential for the chronic weight management market,” Lief said, according to Seeking Alpha’s transcript of the call. “We believe that Belviq represents the much needed innovation in pharmacotherapy to drive the discussion between physicians and patients forward.”

Lorcaserin is Arena’s first drug to win FDA approval. The company was founded in 1997 to discover and develop new drugs for treating cardiovascular, central nervous system, inflammatory, and metabolic diseases. Most of the other drug candidates in Arena’s pipeline remain at an early stage of development. Yet with its lead drug candidate on the threshold of global distribution and with almost 300 employees worldwide, including 220 at Arena’s San Diego headquarters, Lief says the company is well-positioned re-focus on drug research and development.

Under the terms of their expanded agreement with Eisai, Arena said it gets an upfront payment of $60 million and is eligible to receive as much as $176.5 million in milestone payments. Lief says Arena also is eligible to get a total of $1.5 billion in one-time purchase price adjustment payments, based on Eisai’s sales of lorcaserin in countries covered by the agreement. For example, in the third quarter that ended Sept. 30, Arena said it received $1.7 million, or 31.5 percent of Eisai’s $5.4 million in net sales under our agreement, and $300,000 from customer redemptions of a 15-day free-trial discount offer.

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.