Top Deals in June 2015 Aren’t So Big

by | Jun 29, 2015 1:54 pm | Biotechnology, Laboratories, MRI & Dialysis, Pharmaceuticals

Healthcare M&A in June 2015 hasn’t been dead slow, but it certainly hasn’t kept pace with previous months’ totals. With 83 deals and $14.8 billion in spending, June 2015 lags far behind June 2014’s 120 transactions and $59.2 billion in spending. That said, we’re writing this on the day the U.S. Supreme Court found for the defendant (the Obama administration) in King v. Burwell, which means there could be a few very large deals announced between now and next week—particularly in the managed care sector, where the Big Five health insurers have already made plans to consolidate into the Big Three (see last week’s story in Health Care Deal News). For now, here are the five biggest deals... Read More »

Allergan Adds Kythera to Smooth Its Profile

by | Jun 22, 2015 8:47 pm | Biotechnology, Pharmaceuticals

Allergan plc (NYSE: AGN), formerly known as Actavis plc, wasted no time in acquiring another publicly traded company. Last week, Allergan picked up Kythera Biopharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: KYTH) for $2.1 billion, payable 80% in cash and 20% in new AGN shares issued to KYTH shareholders. Kythera’s only marketed product is Kybella™, an injectable drug that is the first and only approved, non-surgical treatment for double chin. The acquisition is expected to be breakeven in 2016 and accretive thereafter. Actavis, er, Allergan remains committed to de-levering to below 3.5x debt to Adjusted EBITDA by the end of the first quarter of 2016. Read More »

May 2015 Health Care M&A vs. May 2014

by | Jun 8, 2015 7:33 pm | Biotechnology, Other Services

Health care deals were fairly strong in the early weeks of May 2015, but deal makers seemed to take a vacation around the Memorial Day weekend, and didn’t get back to work until the first week in June. Here’s how May 2015 transactions compare with the same month the year before, when M&A was booming through the second quarter. The difference isn’t dramatic, but so far in Q2:15, we’ve counted approximately 228 transactions, compared with 325 in Q2:14. Stay tuned. Read More »

Baxalta’s Predecessor Readies for the Spin Off

by | May 18, 2015 5:55 pm | Biotechnology

Baxter BioScience recently agreed to pay $900 million for the Oncaspar® product portfolio owned the Italian biopharma company, Sigma Tau Financiaria SpA. Oncaspar is a biologic used as part of a multi-agent chemotherapy regimen to treat lymphoblastic leukemia, and is marketed in the United States, Germany, Poland and certain other countries. In addition to the drug, Baxter BioScience also acquired another investigational biologic and an established oncology infrastructure with annual sales of approximately $100 million. Very soon, Baxter International Inc. (NYSE: BAX) plans to spin off Baxter BioScience into a new company called Baxalta Incorporated. This deal is a nice going-away present,... Read More »

MedImmune Parcels Out an Investgational Blood Cancer Candidate

by | Apr 20, 2015 4:13 pm | Biotechnology

Last week MedImmune Ltd., the biotech arm of AstraZeneca plc (NYSE: AZN), announced two placements for its investigational compound, MEDI4736. The first announcement was with Juno Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: JUNO), which signed an non-exclusive agreement to test its own investigational CD19-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell candidates with MedImmune’s programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) immune check point inhibitor, MEDI4736, aiming for a combination therapy. No financial details were disclosed on that, but the next day, MedImmune announced a deal with a Swiss subsidiary of Celgene Corp. (NASDAQ: CELG), worth an upfront payment of $450 million from Celgene, to investigate... Read More »

Biotech Blow-Out in 2015

by | Apr 13, 2015 3:45 pm | Biotechnology

Mergers and acquisitions in the biotechnology sector are soaring, and we’ve got the data to prove it. We checked our M&A database, DealSearchOnline, to find the average price per biotechnology deal for each of the past five years. In that span, 2013 posted the highest average, nearly $629 million. We ran the same test for 2015, through April 10, and voila – of the 63 deals we’ve captured so far, 40 of them had prices. This year’s average price per biotech transaction is already $879 million—the highest since we began following this sector in 2000. Read More »