Bayer to showcase health care business to analysts

Germany's Bayer will be holding an investor meeting on its health care business (June 18-19). Ahead of this, analysts at Lehman Brothers have carried out a review of the key oral pipeline drugs currently in late-stage development for stroke prevention in atrial fibrilation.

These are rivaroxaban (Bayer/Johnson & Johnson), apixaban (Bristol-Myers Squibb/Pfizer) and dabigitran (Boehringer Ingelheim). The oral anti-coagulant market for atrial fibrillation is currently dominated by warfarin. However, this drug has serious side effects and, as a result, this therapeutic area has significant opportunity for new entrants with a cleaner adverse event profile. They estimate that the global market for oral anti-coagulants could grow to over $6.0 billion by 2012 if a branded product could be successfully brought to market.

They say that Bayer's rivaroxaban appears solidly placed in all the key indications for this drug. If rivaroxaban is successfully brought to market for AF (Phase II expected to end in 2009) and no competitor gets to there, they could increase the "fair value" estimate by 3 euros per share by lifting peak sales to 4.0 billion euros ($5.39 billion) versus 2.0 billion currently.