finish of Dendreon: Valeant’s $400M is Sole supply, purchase is next
Alex Lash
There shall be no public sale for bankrupt biotech Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDNQ). Valeant pharmaceuticals (NYSE: VRX) has made the one bid for the Seattle company, and with a bankruptcy decide’s approval the bid will become a $ 400 million acquisition.
Dendreon entered Chapter 11 chapter closing fall after a long spiral downward.
Valeant first bid $ 296 million in late January to set a minimal for a possible auction, and it appeared one could be coming. Dendreon’s legal professionals stated in court docket papers that “several bidders” had requested for extra time to position a proposal collectively. a couple of days later, Valeant bumped up its bid to $ 400 million, and no different suitor has emerged. Valeant introduced late Tuesday its acquisition of Dendreon should close with the aid of the top of February, pending courtroom approval.
as soon as regarded as the following cornerstone of Seattle’s biotech community, the firm acquired the primary FDA for a cell-based most cancers immunotherapy in 2010. Its sipuleucel-T (Provenge) was a prostate most cancers treatment that required extracting cells from a affected person, shipping them to a processing heart, genetically engineering them, and shipping them again to be re-infused into the patient.
Dendreon got good marks for making the complicated logistics work, however no longer much else went right. advertising struggles, repayment questions, a excessive $ 93,000 price tag, and other considerations hamstrung Provenge’s launch. while Dendreon took on lots of of hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, new prostate most cancers medicine like abiraterone (Zytiga) and enzalutamide (Xtandi) grabbed market share.
Deerfield management is Dendreon’s largest lender. It holds 36 p.c of the $ 620 million in notes coming due in 2016.
Provenge generated $ 300 million in gross sales remaining yr. Abiraterone, through comparison, generated $ 1.07 billion in gross sales within the first half of of 2014 by myself.
at the time of Valeant’s preliminary bid of $ 296 million in late January, chairman and CEO J. Michael Pearson called a potential Dendreon acquisition an “economic manner” for his firm to enter the oncology space. Valeant is likely one of the drug industry’s most aggressive acquirers, ceaselessly for popular drugs and other business merchandise that don’t require a lot research body of workers and support.
“We imagine that oncology has an identical traits to our current therapeutic portfolios, corresponding to sturdy increase, high sturdiness, robust patient and doctor loyalty, and a terrific compensation regime,” Pearson stated in a statement. “we have now not up to now found an financial strategy to enter this market, however with the unique dynamics of this case, we imagine that this transaction will create significant shareholder value.”
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