Astellas Pharma of Japan is paying $4 billion in cash to acquire the US biotechnology company, OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc, giving it rights to the cancer drug, Tarceva (erlotinib). The purchase price is a sweetened $57.50 per share.
Intercell AG is investing €15 million to acquire antibody technology directed at discovering new therapies for infectious disease including hospital-acquired infections. It is buying the technology from Cytos Biotechnology Ltd.
Galapagos NV said that it has expanded a risk-sharing deal with Roche aimed at discovering new therapies against chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to increase the number of targets for antibody drugs. The deal dates from January 2010.
CureVac GmbH, which is developing therapeutic vaccines against cancer, has raised €27.6 million from dievini Hopp BioTech holding GmbH, the investment company of Dietmar Hopp. The company has a compound for prostate cancer in Phase 2a.
The US National Institutes of Health have awarded $3.4 million to GlycoVaxyn AG of Switzerland and a researcher at the Harvard Medical School to carry out preclinical work on a new S. aureus vaccine for hospital-acquired infections.
Affimed Therapeutics AG of Germany has raised €20 million in a Series C round to bring it antibody candidate for Hodgkin’s lymphoma into the clinic and develop its pipeline. The round was led by existing investors including Novo Nordisk A/S.
Bicycle Therapeutics Ltd, which is developing a new peptide technology, has completed its seed funding round having raised new money from SR One, the venture capital arm of GlaxoSmithKline, and SV Life Sciences. The sums were not disclosed.
MorphoSys AG has confirmed that it expects to report revenue of between €89 to €93 million in 2010, up from €81 million in 2009, and to report an operating profit of €5 to €9 million, compared with €11.4 million the previous year.
Companies looking to partner or licence a medical product or platform often have difficulty working out what the value is of what they are selling. If their product or platform is really new, there is no precedent for establishing value.
Celgene Corp has agreed to pay the privately-held Agios Pharmaceuticals Inc of Cambridge, Massachusetts $130 million upfront, including an equity investment, for access to Agios’s cancer metabolism research platform.