LONDON (Reuters) - AstraZeneca (AZN.L) suffered its biggest daily share price drop a year ago after a key cancer drug trial failed amid feverish speculation the chief executive might quit.
Yet today two-thirds of analysts tracked by Thomson Reuters recommend the stock, making it one of the sector’s biggest consensus buys, and CEO Pascal Soriot says he is “absolutely” happy to carry on into the 2020s as he chases early use of modern cancer drugs.
“I don’t have any plans to retire anytime soon,” he told Reuters.
Soriot and his team are increasingly confident that while AstraZeneca may have lost one part of the battle for cancer market dominance, it can still win elsewhere by targeting tumors before they have spread around the body.
That is the second element of a twin-track strategy to differentiate AstraZeneca in the hot area of immune system-boosting drugs, which has seen rivals - led by Merck & Co (MRK.N) - leap ahead in late-stage or metastatic disease.
The idea that immunotherapy may actually work best in less sick patients is logical, since the immune system’s natural role is to destroy nascent tumors. Indeed, some cancer doctors believe this could become the main battleground in future.
“It’s not yet prime time ... but in the long run I think we will move immunotherapy to a more front-line early disease situation and I hope we will be treating more patients in that setting than in late-stage disease,” said John Haanen, an oncologist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute.
JUMP-START
AstraZeneca already has a jump-start here, since its Imfinzi immunotherapy is the new standard
