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Sanofi Shares Fall on Concern Over Lantus Cancer Risk

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-18/sanofi-shares-fall-on-concern-over-lantus-cancer-risk-update3-.html

By Albertina Torsoli

June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Sanofi-Aventis SA fell the most in a month in Paris trading on renewed concern that the Lantus diabetes treatment, the French drugmaker’s top-selling product, may be linked to an increased risk of cancer.

A study of 1,500 patients published this week in the journal Diabetes Care tied insulin glargine, as Lantus also is known, to a higher cancer risk, according to a note today from Hobart Capital Markets, a London brokerage. The study is “unclear” and “lacks precision,” Jean-Pierre Lehner, Sanofi’s chief medical officer, said in a telephone interview. The study can be “methodologically challenged,” the company said.

Sanofi shares slumped a year ago after Ralph DeFronzo, a researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center, said on a conference call that studies would show Lantus was tied to cancer. As it turned out, the research published in the journal Diabetologia delivered mixed results, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it didn’t show a link.

“There’s no difference in what this study is showing and what was published last year,” Nick Turner, an analyst at Mirabaud Securities in London, said in a telephone interview. “Clearly the risk is relatively light. If anything, this study shows that the risk could be mitigated with dosage, which is a positive.” He has a “neutral” rating on Sanofi’s stock.

Sanofi dropped 2.27 euros, or 4.4 percent, to 48.84 euros at 1:15 p.m. in Paris. The stock slid as much as 7.2 percent, the biggest intraday drop since May 20.

Additional Studies

Sanofi remains confident in the safety of Lantus, Lehner said. Three additional studies are under way, one in the U.S. and two in Europe, involving 1 million patients, he said. The drug had 3.1 billion euros ($3.8 billion) of sales last year.

“You can’t reach reliable conclusions with a study on 1,500 patients,” Lehner said today. “The possible secondary effects of insulin are a real problem and it will take years and years to shed light on the truth.”

Of the 1,500 patients in the study published this week, researchers focused on 112 with diabetes who developed cancer, comparing them to 370 patients matched for age, sex and weight to see if they could tease out any differences that may have contributed to tumor development. During the six-year review, the number of people exposed to each type of insulin was similar, the researchers said. A link to cancer was seen only in those getting higher doses of Lantus, and not other insulins such as Novo Nordisk A/S’s Levemir, the researchers said.

The researchers, led by Edoardo Mannucci from the Careggi Teaching Hospital’s diabetes agency in Florence, Italy, said the possible link between Lantus and cancer should be considered.

“We should all be aware that the epidemiological approach cannot provide definitive conclusions on the effects of any pharmacological treatment,” they wrote.