an Cambridge Antibodies (CAT)!
The Sunday Times May 14, 2006
Astra Zeneca to swoop on Cambridge drug group
Mark Kleinman and Paul Durman
THE British pharmaceuticals giant Astra Zeneca is this week expected to unveil a deal to acquire Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT), a smaller drug developer that is a rare biotech success story.
It is thought the deal could value CAT at more than £600m, a substantial premium to its stock-market value on Friday. With its shares closing at 796Åp, CAT is worth about £420m.
Astra Zeneca, which is being advised in the talks by Goldman Sachs, already works closely with the smaller company, the two having embarked on a strategic development alliance in November 2004.
At the time, Astra Zeneca paid £75m for a 19.9% stake in CAT, and the two partners committed themselves to spend at least £100m on 25 drug discovery projects, with a particular focus on respiratory disease and other inflammatory disorders.
The partnership has proceeded well — this year CAT said the alliance “is meeting our highest expectations”. But until recently neither side seemed interested in expanding the deal beyond the joint venture.
However, Dave Brennan, Astra Zeneca’s new American chief executive, is under pressure to replenish a drugs pipeline that was seriously weakened by a series of setbacks with internally developed medicines in 2004.
Since his promotion last year, Brennan has pushed ahead with a series of product and company acquisitions from the biotech sector, increasingly regarded as the engine of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry.
Starting last December, Astra Zeneca has struck a £195m deal to license an anti-sepsis product from Protherics, a British firm previously best-known for snake anti-venom; secured a $1 billion licensing deal with Athero Genics for a heart disease treatment in late-stage clinical trials; paid £120m for Kudos Pharmaceuticals, a privately owned cancer therapy firm; made a $300m deal with Targacept to acquire a product to treat Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia; and agreed a $200m deal for the rights to co-promote a breast cancer drug called Abraxane.
These deals are intended to give Astra Zeneca new products to sell in the near future. An acquisition of CAT will not bring such immediate benefits because most of the potential drugs it is developing are still at an early stage.
CAT’s biggest success to date was its role in developing Humira, the rheumatoid arthritis treatment that is the first blockbuster drug to emerge from the British biotech industry.
Humira, which is licensed for sale to Abbott Laboratories of America, achieved sales of $1.4 billion last year, and is expected to reach close to $2 billion this year. However, CAT receives a modest royalty of 2.688% on sales of Humira — and this was secured only last October after a long legal battle with Abbott.
CAT, headed since 2002 by Peter Chambre. has been a listed company since 1997, but has yet to achieve profitability. Chambre had hoped to make the company profitable by 2008, but this target was recently dropped.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2095-2179188.html Das finde ich ziemlich günstig. Hoffentlich lehnt CAT das als feindlich ab..... Wenns klappt: Noch ein KOnkurrent weniger. Die Kunden werden MOR noch stärker als bisher die Bude einrennen. Es machte sowieso kein AK-Hersteller mehr Partnerdeals als Morphosys in den letzten 2 Jahren. Bin ja mal gespannt: Abgenix weggekauft, CAT mit Angebot. Bleiben noch medarex, Morphosys und Dyax übrig als voll humane AK-Hersteller. Grüße
ecki |
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