Zeltia revenues up ahead of boost to come from Yondelis

Spain’s Zeltia, which has just launched the cancer drug Yondelis in Europe, has posted a 4.2% increase in revenues to 66.9 million euros for the first nine months of 2007, while the firm’s net loss stayed at roughly the same level at 32.3 million euros. The turnover rise is due largely to the contribution made by the Italian hygiene products company Copyr, which was acquired by Zeltia's Zelnova unit last year, while biotechnology revenues totalled 5.7 million euros. R&D expenditure slipped 2.6% to 35.9 million euros, due to the completion of large clinical trials at Zeltia’s PharmaMar unit which accounted for 25.6 millions euro of the spend. The company’s Neuropharma division, which is getting ready to start Phase II clinical trials on NP-61, for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, spent 9.3 million euros. However it will be Zeltia’s next set of financials that will prove to be interesting as PharmaMar has just made its first commercial sales of Yondelis (trabectedin) which was recently approved by the European Commission for the treatment of soft tissue sarcoma. It is already on the market in the UK and Germany and is being sold in the former by IDIS, while in the rest of Europe, PharmaMar is to distribute the drug through a network it has established with Innovex, part of the Quintiles group.