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Biotech / Medical : Amgen Inc. (AMGN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fred woodall who wrote (434)	1/14/1998 12:58:00 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1906

Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN) main goal to change Epogen policies Reuters, Tuesday, January 13, 1998 at 17:31 SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Amgen Inc's number one goal in 1998 will be to persuade the U.S. government to change its reimbursement policies on Epogen, President and Chief Operating Officer Kevin Sharer said Monday. "We are in very, very intense, frequent and widespread talks on this matter and there is a growing body of opinion to support our position," Sharer told the Hambrecht and Quist Healthcare Conference here. "But it is difficult to predict what the government is going to do." Amgen's efforts are aimed at reversing government policies adopted last year that reduced the number of patients who qualified for Medicaid reimbursement for Epogen treatment. The change brought a sharp drop in the sales growth rate for Epogen and will result in, "tough comparisons" between the first half of 1998 and the year-ago period, Sharer said. Until it succeeds in reversing the new policies, Amgen's main source of revenue growth in Epogen will be building the patient population, Sharer said. The annual growth rate in the patient population continues at "at least" seven percent. Epogen, a growth factor that boosts red blood cell count and is widely used by patients on kidney dialysis, has long been the company's best selling drug, generating more than $1 billion in annual revenues. But the slowdown in its sales growth has stirred significant concern amid signs that none of Amgen's new drugs have such large market potential. At the conference Tuesday, Sharer said the outlook remains "very strong" for Amgen's other main drug, the Neupogen white blood cell growth factor that is used by cancer chemotherapy patients and some AIDS patients. Nevertheless, Sharer said Amgen is a company in transition, broadening its technological base from protein-based research to include more genomic and small molecule research. This strategy is aimed at developing multiple compounds to build on the momentum of its first two blockbuster drugs. So far, this has proved to be a challenge for Amgen. Sharer said Tuesday that Infergen, its hepatitis B drug that was approved last year, is in a "tough game" against competing drugs. "(Infergen) is not an overnight kind of drug. It takes months to work, but we believe it is demonstrably superior to the competition," he said. Copyright 1998, Reuters News Service