(Yicai) Feb. 25 -- Global pharmaceutical heavyweights, including the likes of Pfizer and AstraZeneca, are shelling out huge sums to secure the licensing rights to Chinese weight-loss drugs, as a fierce scramble for next-generation obesity treatments redraws the competitive map.

The latest deal came yesterday, when Hangzhou-based Sciwind Biosciences announced that Pfizer China had agreed to pay as much as USD495 million for the exclusive commercialization rights in the Chinese mainland to ecnoglutide, its glucagon-like peptide-1 drug.

California-based Sciwind will continue to undertake the research and development, registration, and production of ecnoglutide. The drug has already been approved for the treatment of type 2 diabetes in China, and is awaiting approval for weight-loss management. 

China offers a huge market for multinational drugmakers. Just over 14 percent of Chinese adults are obese, and the government has included weight-loss management in its Healthy China 2030 initiative, according to Jean-Christophe Pointeau, president of Pfizer China.

Healthy China 2030 is a public health strategy launched in 2019 to improve national health outcomes by the end of this decade. The government added a weight management campaign to the initiative last December, saying that obesity and excess body weight are now "a major public health threat.”

“Multinationals are re-evaluating the value of China’s innovative drugs,” a biotech investor told Yicai. “Next-generation obesity drugs are a strategic priority for global development pipelines and the market potential is enormous.”

The global market for GLP-1 drugs may grow to USD95 billion by 2030 and USD120 billion by 2035, US investment bank Goldman Sachs predicted last year.

Last December, Pfizer also reached a licensing agreement with YaoPharma, a unit of Shanghai-based Fosun Pharmaceutical Group, agreeing to pay up to USD2 billion for the exclusive global rights to an oral small molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist, a medicine used for type 2 diabetes.

CSPC Pharmaceutical Group granted US-based Madrigal Pharmaceuticals the exclusive global rights to its oral small molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist last July. The deal could be worth as much as USD2.08 billion for the firm, which is headquartered in Hebei province. CSPC also licensed a dual-target new-generation weight-loss injection drug to AstraZeneca earlier this year. 

In March last year, Denmark’s Novo Nordisk and United Laboratories International Holdings reached an authorization agreement for UBT251, a new generation triple-target weight loss drug, with the Hong Kong-based firm receiving a down payment of USD200 million. The value of that transaction could reach USD2 billion. 

Domestic companies such as Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, Hansoh Pharmaceutical Group, and Shanghai Chengyi Biological Technology have also successfully entered the international market by licensing their GLP-1 type drugs.

Editor: Tom Litting