Sales exceeding expectations have prompted Swiss biotech company Actelion to announce third quarter results a week early, and raise its targets for the year.

Sales exceeding expectations have prompted Swiss biotech company Actelion to announce third quarter results a week early, and raise its targets for the year.

Actelion’s total net revenues were up 40 per cent for the first nine months of 2005 - 477.1 million Swiss francs (CHF), compared with CHF 341.5 million in 2004. Actelion has two products, Tracleer for pulmonary arterial hypertension, and Zavesca for the rare enzyme-deficiency Gaucher disease. Tracleer sales in the first nine months of 2005 totalled CHF 455.1 million compared to CHF 325.4 million in the first nine months of 2004. 

Actelion’s chief financial officer Andrew Oakley said the results were ’outstanding’. CEO Jean-Paul Clozel said he was delighted. ’Actelion has been successful in growing the pulmonary arterial hypertension market more rapidly than we expected, with physicians becoming even more aware of the benefits of diagnosis and treatment with our dual endothelin receptor antagonist Tracleer,’ said Clozel.

Actelion has a number of undisclosed drugs in the pipeline. Clozel hopes that one of them will be the one that makes Actelion a much bigger company. ’We just need one blockbuster,’ he said. Katharine Sanderson