AstraZeneca agrees to pay Japan's Daiichi $6 bn for new cancer drug

AstraZeneca Plc agreed to pay as much as $6 billion to buy into Daiichi Sankyo Co.’s promising medicine for lung and breast cancer, the drugmakers’ second potential blockbuster oncology deal in two years.

The UK drugmaker will pay Japan’s Daiichi $1 billion upfront to jointly develop and bring to market a cancer therapy in early clinical tests called DS-1062, the companies said Monday. As much as $5 billion in additional payments could follow, subject to regulatory and sales milestones.

AstraZeneca is forging ahead to become a global oncology powerhouse, even as it works on a vaccine for the coronavirus pandemic. Last year, the firm committed to pay Daiichi as much as $6.9 billion for another cancer medicine, which marked its biggest deal in more than a decade. For the Japanese company, the deal is the latest in what has turned into a transformative partnership. 

Besides the cancer deals, Daiichi is in talks to make Astra’s Covid-19 vaccine in Japan. The Daiichi treatment, an antibody-drug conjugate that targets tumors that express a protein known as TROP2, is “extraord­inary,” José Baselga, Astra’s head of cancer research, said in an interview. He described it as an “agent that could transform and will transform the therapy landscape.”