Helsinn Celebrates its 40th Anniversary

~ 40 years helping patients achieve a better quality of life ~  

Lugano, Switzerland, January 11, 2016: Helsinn, the Swiss pharmaceutical Group focused on building quality cancer care, is delighted to launch its 40th anniversary celebrations in San Francisco, US, at the time of the JP Morgan 34^th Annual Healthcare Conference. Helsinn believes its core values of respect, integrity and quality have underpinned four decades of progress in helping patients enjoy a better quality of life, and is delighted to be able to reaffirm those principles.

Riccardo Braglia, Vice Chairman and Helsinn Group CEO, commented at the start of Helsinn’s 40^th anniversary year: “As cancer treatments improve, enabling people to live longer, cancer is becoming a ‘chronic’ disease. The need for products designed to improve quality of life has never been more fundamental.

“Helsinn’s cancer-care therapies have evolved in line with the needs of people with cancer and have played a critical role in shaping the supportive care market. For 40 years we have been improving the everyday lives of patients, always guided by our core family values of respect, integrity and quality. We maintain the highest standards and provide world-class products and services that improve health and quality of life for people affected by cancer worldwide.”

A family-owned business founded in 1976, Helsinn has been built around a commitment to quality and innovation in cancer supportive care and the management of other debilitating health conditions. Over the past 40 years the medical and scientific communities have progressively acknowledged the importance and benefits of managing cancer symptoms and the secondary effects of cancer treatment alongside the provision of core cancer therapies. Building on its strong foundations, Helsinn now supports people with cancer in more than 90 countries, through a network of over 70 trusted commercial and marketing partners.

Working with these international partners, Helsinn has created a successful portfolio of products that aims to improve the lives of people with cancer. Alongside its partnering activities, Helsinn has a high quality and growing R&D engine, from pre-clinical research through all phases of clinical development with proven expertise and focus in cancer care. In the last five years Helsinn has reinvested an average of 30 per cent of its turnover each year on R&D and Helsinn now has more than 600 committed employees globally, with a presence in Switzerland, Ireland, US and China.

Helsinn, alongside its commercial and financial growth, puts great emphasis on its employees, partners, stakeholders and the wider community, and is committed to an ethical approach to business, built around its family ethos. Helsinn’s core values of respect, integrity and quality are at the heart of everything the Company does. In 2015, the Group was accredited with the CEO Gold Standard and its Global Sustainability report was approved by Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

Since its inception, Helsinn has built a comprehensive portfolio of market-leading products, such as Aloxi®, the market-leading treatment for chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting (CINV) and the next generation Akynzeo®, the first approved fixed combination oral agent that targets two critical signaling pathways associated with CINV by combining netupitant, an NK1 receptor antagonist, and palonosetron, a 5-HT3 receptor antagonist, in a single capsule for the prevention of CINV. Akynzeo® has now been approved and is marketed in both the US and Europe and more recently it has been included as a treatment option in both the ASCO and NCCN anitemesis guidelines.

In addition to standard of care drugs, Helsinn has an extensive portfolio of internationally marketed therapies for indications including oral mucositis, acute pain and primary dysmenorrhea, osteoarthritis, adult rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, musculoskeletal and painful periarticular disorders and gout.

Helsinn also has a broad pipeline of programs targeting other unmet needs in cancer supportive care including chemotherapy-induced diarrhea, cancer anorexia cachexia and chemotherapyinduced neuropathic pain, metabolic conditions, and through its new Helsinn Integrative Care division, non-pharmaceutical products and treatments. From its roots 40 years ago in a small office in Chiasso, Switzerland, Helsinn is now not only providing the cancer supportive care products that help people with debilitating and chronic diseases around the world, but working with industry bodies and patient groups to help educate health systems, doctors and patients to provide the tools to improve the quality of life of people with cancer.

In 2016, our 40^th anniversary year, you can meet representatives from Helsinn at:

• JP Morgan Healthcare Conference (San Francisco, USA, 11-14 January)
• Informex (New Orleans, USA, 2-4 February)
• NCCN Annual Conference (Hollywood, FL, USA, 31 March-2 April)
• ASCO Annual Meeting (Chicago, USA, 3-7 June)
• MAASC Annual Meeting (Adelaide, Australia, 23-25 June)
• CPhI Worldwide (Barcelona, Spain, 4-6 October)
• ESMO Congress (Copenhagen, Denmark, 7-11 October)
• BioEurope (Köln, Germany, 4-6 November)

About Helsinn Group
Helsinn is a privately owned cancer supportive care pharmaceutical group with an extensive portfolio of marketed products and a broad development pipeline. Since 1976, Helsinn has been improving the everyday lives of patients, guided by core family values of respect, integrity and quality, through a unique integrated licensing business model working with long standing partners in pharmaceuticals, medical devices and nutritional supplement products. Helsinn is headquartered in Lugano, Switzerland, with operating subsidiaries in Ireland and the US (Helsinn Therapeutics), a representative office in China, as well as a product presence in about 90 countries globally.

For more information, please visit www.helsinn.com.
For more information, please contact: 
Helsinn Group
Paola Bonvicini
Head of Communication & Press Office
PH +41 91-985-21-21
[email protected] 

For media / external enquiries: 
Consilium Strategic Communications
Mary-Jane Elliott, Jessica Hodgson, Matthew Neal, Laura Thornton
+44 203 709 5700
[email protected]