ThromboGenics Falls After Novartis Says Eye Drug Sales Lagging
(Bloomberg) — ThromboGenics NV, whose only approved product is the eye drug Jetrea, fell after its partner Novartis AG said sales of the injection won’t be as strong as expected.
ThromboGenics fell as much as 6.4 percent and was 6 percent lower at 7.34 euros as of 4:56 p.m. in Brussels. The stock had risen as much as 2.4 percent before Jeff George, head of Novartis’s Alcon eye-care unit, said on a call with analysts that sales of Jetrea have been disappointing.
Novartis, based in Basel, Switzerland, holds the marketing rights for Jetrea outside the U.S., while Heverlee, Belgium- based ThromboGenics, which developed Jetrea, sells it in the U.S., where sales totaled 20.2 million euros ($23 million) in 2013.
“Time’s going to tell as to how much we’ll be able to really continue to drive this,” George said on the call. “It’s been below expectations of what we would have liked to have seen. I’m optimistic that this will be a good product for us, but I don’t think it’s a product maybe on the order of what was expected a couple of years ago.”
Jetrea is an injection to treat a vision-destroying condition called vitreomacular adhesion that was previously treated with surgery.
To contact the reporter on this story: Simeon Bennett in Geneva at sbennett9@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chitra Somayaji at csomayaji@bloomberg.net David Risser
