(Bloomberg) -- Biogen Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer is searching for smaller deals to expand its treatment portfolio as the company prepares for a future that he expects will be highly dependent on Alzheimer’s disease drugs.

“We could spend a couple of billion this year” on deals, CEO Chris Viehbacher said in an interview at Bloomberg News headquarters in New York. 

Since joining Biogen in late 2022, Viehbacher has been seeking growth engines to replace the company’s declining multiple sclerosis drug business while it waits for revenues from a new Alzheimer’s drug to start to roll in. Last year, Viehbacher led the company’s largest-ever acquisition, paying $7.3 billion for Reata Pharmaceuticals Inc. and its approved treatment for the rare neurological disease Friedreich’s ataxia.

This year, deals could come in the form of research collaborations or licensing pacts but could also be outright acquisitions of smaller, earlier-stage companies, he said. In terms of larger transactions, “we don’t have the cash fire-power to do one this year,” Viehbacher said, but could be interested starting in 2025.

Viehbacher, the former CEO of French drug giant Sanofi SA, is cutting costs by about $1 billion and has laid off a layer of management in an attempt to return the company to growth. But the company is still heavily dependent on the Alzheimer’s drug Leqembi which it sells with partner Eisai Co.  

Leqembi, which received FDA approval last year, is off to a slow start because neurology centers have to set up scanning and infusion infrastructure in order to safely use the drug, though prescriptions have accelerated recently. Biogen’s first-quarter sales of the drug were $19 million.

“We’re a good way through” getting the top hospitals up and running with the drug, he said. “Certainly by the end of the year we will have gotten the top centers all aligned and ordering.”

Leqembi could soon face competition from Eli Lilly & Co., whose experimental Alzheimer’s drug donanemab is scheduled for review by an FDA advisory panel in June. Viehbacher said he’s confident that Biogen can compete with the new entrant and believes another drug would help expand the market in the long run.

As to which treatment individual doctors or hospitals will prefer, he said. “I suspect this is going to be a Coke-Pepsi thing.” 

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