Deerfield To NitroMed: Not So Fast, Not So Cheap
This article was originally published in The Pink Sheet Daily
Executive Summary
NitroMed stakeholder Deerfield Management moves to block the company’s planned reverse merger with Archemix with a $0.50 per share bid of its own.
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Highlights from the Q1 2009 review of pharmaceutical and biotechnology dealmaking: With 57 transactions raising $1.09 billion, financing activity for Q1 2009 showed a 137% increase over Q4 2008's total. The largest deal was an initial public offering--Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. sold off 15% of Mead Johnson Nutrition Co. for $684 million-the first since Bioheart Inc.'s February 2008 IPO. In M&A, Big Pharma mega-mergers was the big story as two major players--Wyeth and Schering-Plough--were scooped up by Pfizer Inc. and Merck & Co. Inc., respectively, in deals together valued at $109 billion, making up 96% of the Q1 M&A dollar volume. Biopharma alliances-with a 25% decrease in number of deals--only reached about half the dollar volume of Q4 2008, but Bristol-Myers Squibb continued its strong performance along with several other Big Pharma players that joined the playing field; GlaxoSmithKline PLC and Novartis AG, each with five alliances, tied as the quarter's most active deal makers. Much of the fourth quarter's alliance activity followed an option-based deal structure with the biotech handling R&D through pre-proof-of-concept after which the Big Pharma partner then takes over later-stage development and commercialization.