Zydus Lifesciences Ltd. is focussing on scaling up its speciality business in the US. The company is looking to explore the way to deploy its capital efficiently to not only scale up the business, but also have a diversified large business on the speciality front, said Dr. Sharvil Patel, Managing Director, Zydus Lifesciences Ltd. in a post results earnings call held on August 9, 2024.

Elaborating further, Patel said that there are two areas that the company is focusing on when it comes to the US specialty side. “One is the rare disease business through our business unit of Sentynl Therapeutics. So, today we have two commercialized products, one which we just recently acquired, and one which we had done a few years ago, a year ago. And we have a third molecule, which is the CUTX-101, which is in the NDA stage of filing. So currently, it's a three-asset business,” Patel said adding that the company aims to slowly build this business up over the next two years, mostly through small inorganic opportunities, to scale that up, and build a niche rare disease business.

“Now in the rare disease business, the focus has to be, obviously for us to have a product-to-market, because again, the disease is very rare. But then it is to find new patients, which means a lot of work that needs to get done in education, in getting early diagnosis, and getting the right diagnosis and treatment, because these are life-saving drugs. So, our effort is on creating a larger access for some of these drugs and finding the patients at the right time so that we can make them available,” he added.

With respect to the orphan disease business, Zydus is banking on its asset, which is Saroglitazar drug. “If everything goes well, it's a calendar year 27 kind of opportunity to commercialize,” Patel said.

The company is also looking at an inorganic opportunity over the next two years to have a commercially ready footprint in the US when Saroglitazar comes up for launch. “And that is what we hope to do in the next two years, to find a commercial asset that we can either partner or we could acquire, and build a front end commercial asset in the US, which can also take Saroglitazar with it. Even if it doesn't, we do already have an organic plan to build our own commercial team in the US. But we will keep both options open for us for the orphan side of it in the US. So, these are the two areas we hope to build,” he added.