Big Pharma caminha para biotecnologia

O fim da química fina como atividade da BigPharma avança. Depois da compra da Genentech pela Roche, agora há outras aquisições previstas no mesmo sentido.Vejam a reportagem abaixo do The New York Times.

Bristol-Myers Offers $4.5 Billion for Rest of ImClone

By STEPHANIE SAUL and ANDREW POLLACK Published: August 1, 2008 Bristol-Myers Squibb said Thursday that it planned an offer of $60 a share, or about $4.5 billion, to acquire the rest of ImClone Systems, the maker of the cancer drug Erbitux.The company said in a regulatory filing that it had delivered the offer by letter to the chairman of ImClone, Carl C. Icahn. Bristol currently owns about 17 percent of ImClone, a biotechnology company. The cash offer represents a premium of about 30 percent over ImClone’s closing share price on Wednesday. But investors apparently believed the sale price of ImClone could go even higher, bidding up the company’s shares by 37 percent, to $63.74, a half-hour before the market close. Shares in Bristol-Myers Squibb were off 1 percent, to $21.28. Global sales of Erbitux in 2007 exceeded $1.4 billion. Bristol’s offer comes little more than a week after another drug giant, Roche, offered to buy the 44 percent of its longtime biotechnology partner, Genentech, that it did not already own for $43.7 billion. And it comes during a period in which big pharmaceutical companies are buying smaller biotechnology players to gain rights to products to replenish their pipelines. Recent deals include Takeda Pharmaceutical’s offer to buy Millennium Pharmaceuticals for $8.8 billion and GlaxoSmithKline’s purchase of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals for $720 million. Companies like Genentech and ImClone sell so-called biologic products, which are made in living cells. Such drugs are particularly attractive because they are not subject to a sudden rush of competition by generic manufacturers. Bristol ’s offer set off speculation on Wall Street that other big drug makers might would seek to acquire biotechnology companies that are already their partners. Share of Onyx Pharmaceuticls, which co-developed a cancer drug with Bayer, were up about 9 percent in midday trading, as were shares of Amylin Pharmaceuticals, which co-developed a diabetes drug with Eli Lilly.