Pharmaceutical corporations Oscotec said first-quarter revenue rose 88% from a year earlier, helped by expanded global sales of the lung cancer drug Lazertinib.
Oscotec said on the 14th that, on a consolidation basis, it posted first-quarter revenue of 3.65 billion won and an operating loss of 9.99 billion won.
Revenue increased 88.4% from the same period a year earlier. This is seen as an effect of higher royalty revenue from expanded global sales of Leclaza (ingredient Lazertinib), an EGFR-mutant Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treatment that the company transferred to Yuhan in 2015. Under the current royalty structure tied to Leclaza sales, Yuhan receives 60%, while Oscotec and Genosco receive 20% each.
The company said that with the start of Lazertinib commercialization in Europe, it expects to receive $10.2 million on a consolidation basis (about 15.2 billion won) from the milestone Yuhan received from Janssen Biotech.
However, the operating loss continued due to expanded clinical work on core pipelines and increased research and development investment. First-quarter research and development expenses were 6.35 billion won, up from a year earlier.
Oscotec has also moved to build an anti-resistance oncology platform to secure growth drivers beyond Lazertinib.
The company recently created a core technology team within its research institute and hired Dr. Regis Grailhe, who led an image-based efficacy screening platform at Institut Pasteur Korea.
It plans to build a platform that systematically analyzes resistance mechanisms that arise during cancer treatment and to expand into research to discover new targets through AI and systems biology–based analysis.
Oscotec is conducting a phase 1 clinical trial for the anti-resistance oncology candidate OCT-598, while the kidney fibrosis inhibitor candidate OCT-648 is in the preclinical stage.