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 »Big Pharma Pays Big for Biotech Pipelines
The pharmaceutical industry has largely given up on in-house research and development, saying that the R&D timeline is too costly, long and uncertain to fund with shareholders’ money. The industry has gone from bolt-on acquisitions of smaller companies with marketed products to battling it out for clinical-stage drug candidates. What’s surprised some industry observers is that these acquirers are now targeting early-stage and even pre-clinical drug candidates, to boost their own production pipelines, but as a way to stymie the competition, too. Pharmaceutical mergers and acquisitions hit a peak in 2014, with 188 deals (up 25% year-over-year) and $213.3 billion in spending (up 220%... Read More »Recent Health Care Deals, week ending 3.18.16
AcquirerTargetPrice Canon Inc.Toshiba Medical Systems $5.9 billion Nautic PartnersExactCare® Pharmacy$150 million Envision Healthcare Holdings, Inc.Emergency Physicians Medical Group $120 million RocheCollaboration on cancer immunotherapy drugs$45 million Microlin Bio, Inc.Nucleic acid therapeutic assets$7.7... Read More »
Pharma Cozies Up to Diagnostic Labs
Last year, the Laboratory, MRI & Dialysis sector posted robust deal volume, relatively speaking. The total of 52 announced transactions was a 58% gain compared with the year before, and better than every year since 2007, when 54 deals were announced (see the chart below). Two of the deals targeting a diagnostic lab or technology were made by major pharmaceutical companies. The common thread we’re seeing as we look back in our database is that these pharma companies are gaining another entry to physician practices, like the camel getting its nose under the tent. The largest deal was OPKO Health’s (NYSE: OPK) $1.47 billion acquisition of Bio-Reference Laboratories (NASDAQ:... Read More »Schedule a demo
Gain access to the best healthcare and long-term care investment intelligence, data, and analysis.
