Perrigo Lets Go of Tysabri Royalties
What goes around comes around. It doesn’t seem that long ago that the Dublin-based drug firm Elan Corporation plc was fighting off the hostile advances of Royalty Pharma. It was July 2013, in fact, when Elan agreed to be acquired by Perrigo (NYSE: PRGO) for $8.6 billion. To refresh the memory, Elan was a biotech company whose portfolio included royalties from Tysabri®, a multiple sclerosis treatment, and a neuropsychiatric pipeline with near-term value creation potential. Early February 2013, Elan sold half of its rights to Tysabri to Biogen Idec, now known as Biogen Inc. (NASDAQ: BIIB), for $3.25 billion. At the time, the terms called for $3.25 billion upfront cash plus 12% of... Read More »January Deal Volume Beats December 2016 and January 2016
The year got off to a good start, as far as mergers and acquisitions are concerned. Deal volume reached 156 transactions in January, up 19% compared with December 2016, and up 50% over January 2016. It’s easy to point to the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, held in January, as the cause of the sudden boost, particularly in the Biotechnology and eHealth sectors. But the conference didn’t have the same effect last January, when just 104 deals were reported, and those two sectors didn’t see comparable deal volume. If anything, deal volume might have been expected to decline, considering all the “repeal and replace” talk from the incoming Republican administration. That obviously... Read More »Mallinckrodt Divests to Pursue Specialty Pharma Niche
The latest watchword for the pharmaceutical industry is “specialization,” as in “specialization is a safer bet than diversification.” A lot of big-name pharma companies are divesting their non-core businesses in order to target specific therapeutics and disease areas. The most recent example is Mallinckrodt plc (NYSE:MNK), which has sold off approximately $893 million of its assets in the past six months, in order to focus on its specialty pharmaceutical platforms in autoimmune and rare diseases. In August 2016, Mallinckrodt sold its nuclear imaging business for $690 million to IBA Molecular, a global manufacturer and distributor of... Read More »JNJ Bolsters Its Pipeline with Actelion Acquisition
It took a while, but Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) finally bagged Swiss-based Actelion Ltd. (SIX: ATLN), Europe’s biggest biotech company. The company had been in play since August 2016, when J&J began negotiations, but eventually bowed out after offering $260 per share, or $28 billion. Sanofi S.A. (NYSE: SNY) moved in and by mid-December, Bloomberg reported, the two parties were discussing a price of $275 per share, valuing Actelion at $29.6 billion. For both suitors, a deal with Actelion would boost their aging pipelines. Actelion, which was formed in 1997 as a spin-out from Roche (SIX: RO), had developed a strong portfolio of drugs for pulmonary arterial hypertension, a... Read More »Pharmaceutical Deals Celebrate the New Year
The Pharmaceutical sector hasn’t wasted any time getting busy in the New Year. As of January 18, 2017, 10 pharma deals have been announced, with disclosed prices totaling $7.18 billion. Of course, the annual JP Morgan Healthcare Summit, held this year from January 9 to January 13, helped to boost the announcements. The largest deal so far was Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd.’s (OTCQB: TKPYY) $4.67 billion ($24.00 per share) takeover of ARIAD Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: ARIA). ARIAD is an oncology company that discovers, develops and commercializes drugs for patients with rare cancers. A large motivator for the deal was to gain access to Iclusig® (ponatinib), a globally commercialized... Read More »Schedule a demo
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