Australia’s CSL is plopping down $11.7 billion to acquire Vifor Pharma, the Swiss biotech best known for its iron products and kidney drugs.
While the buyout comes as little surprise — rumors have swirled since early December, and Vifor actually confirmed the deal talks to media on Monday — the final price could raise some eyebrows.
At $179.25 per share, CSL’s offer comes in much higher than the ‘more than $8.5 billion’ price tag cited in reports.
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Sensor-based technology for clinical trial data collection represents the latest medical paradigm shift. There are more than 700 clinical studies involving wearable devices currently underway in the United States. A study from Intel IT projects their inclusion in clinical trials will surge to 70% by 2025.
Apps, biosensors and patient-centered technologies increase visibility of comprehensive patient data. Pharma leaders anticipate the benefits of wearables to include better data (58%), faster results (33%) and lower trial costs (10%).
When Bristol Myers Squibb celebrated the approval of ozanimod — branded Zeposia — in ulcerative colitis earlier this year, the company touted the first gastrointestinal indication for an S1P receptor modulator.
Now Pfizer wants to give the pharma rival a run for its money.
Pfizer is dropping $6.7 billion to acquire Arena Pharmaceuticals, whose lead drug, etrasimod, targets the sphingosine 1-phosphate receptor.
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Harpreet Singh, Immatics CEO (Credit: Allogeneic Cell Therapies Summit)
Just a few weeks after offering a positive readout on its first early clinical-stage offering, the transatlantic biotech Immatics is back with news that the research crowd around Rupert Vessey at Bristol Myers Squibb has anted up $150 million in cash to get on at the ground floor with one of their still-preclinical efforts.
This time the news is centered on IMA401, Immatics’ most advanced bispecific, which uses one binder to latch on to MAGEA4/8 while another is used to whip up T cell activity against tumor cells where that’s a common antigen. For now, that’s still a preclinical effort, with the first human trial set to launch in the first half of next year.
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Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) (Graeme Sloan/Sipa via AP Images)
It’s no longer a secret that the US government is going to have to pay for Biogen’s new and expensive Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm on the backs of huge increases in Medicare premiums.
CMS explained last month that Medicare Part B will have to increase (by the largest amount ever) its standard monthly premium — from $148.50 in 2021 to $170.10 in 2022 — in part because of the massive spending that could occur should CMS sign off on a national coverage decision for Aduhelm, and its $56,000 annual price tag next year.
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AnHeart Therapeutics co-founder and CEO Jerry Wang (L); co-founder and CBO Lihua Zheng (R)
In China, the character 安, pronounced An in English phonics, has a few different translations — yet they all come to the same general meaning: calm, safe, comfortable.
And for precision oncology biotech AnHeart Therapeutics, that Chinese character helps to define the company’s objective.
‘In Chinese, the pronunciation actually means something — [it] has special meaning: calm, safe, comfortable. So it’s really — you have a very calm heart, comfortable heart full of patients. So we try to make medicine so the patient can feel comfortable, feel safe. Feel calm,’ AnHeart CBO and co-founder Lihua Zheng told Endpoints News.
Rumors have swirled around a potential buyout of Switzerland’s Vifor Pharma by Australia’s CSL since the start of December, and now the gossip reportedly has some truth to it.
Vifor confirmed to Reuters early Monday that it is in discussions to be acquired by CSL for more than $8.5 billion, sending its shares up more than 15% in overseas trading. The deal is expected to be finalized Tuesday, according to Australian media, with one large investor reportedly willing to pay more than $173 per share — about $60 more than Vifor’s price before the rumors began circulating on Dec. 2.
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Albert Bourla, Pfizer CEO (Getty Images)
A new private study by South Africa’s largest insurer, Discovery Health, suggests that Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine is just 33% effective against infections by the Omicron variant.
However, the variant appears to cause less severe disease, the company reported. The data, based on 211,000 positive Covid cases, showed that risk of hospitalization was 29% lower than in South Africa’s first wave back in mid-2020.
Jacob Van Naarden (Lilly Oncology)
Jake Van Naarden, who rules the oncology roost at Eli Lilly, is back in the dealmaking game.
Monday morning he uncorked a deal to provide Flagship-backed Foghorn Therapeutics $380 million — $300 million in cash and $80 million for a premium equity deal — to jump on board the biotech’s development platform. The deal gives him co-development and co-commercialization rights to their BRM selective program — which uses protein degradation and enzymatic inhibition — directed against BRG1 mutations. Those mutations are aligned along 5% of all tumors and 10% of NSCLC.
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Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann (via Agreus Group)
While the ultimate fate of Novartis’ big generics arm Sandoz may still be up in the air, there’s no doubt it’s in play as a potential buyout target.
Overnight, Reuters picked up on a report out of Germany that EQT and the billionaire Strüngmann brothers — enjoying a huge windfall from the overnight success of BioNTech’s mRNA Covid vaccine — are kicking the tires at Sandoz. And Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan confirmed they’ve seen some M&A interest, even if no hard offers are on the table.
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https://endpts.com/ma-season-starts-early-csl-seals-11-7b-acquisition-of-vifor-pharma/
