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Biopharma deal-making in 2014: a record year for M&A value

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 14, pages 84–85 (2015)Cite this article

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Highlights of deal-making activity in 2014 include divestitures and asset swaps among large pharmaceutical companies, and a slew of cancer-immunotherapy alliances. The year was also notable for the deals that didn't take place, owing to the US Treasury's changes to tax rules to discourage inversion transactions — most notably, a failed bid by Pfizer to buy AstraZeneca that would have been worth over US$100 billion and AbbVie's abandoned ~$54-billion bid for Shire. Nevertheless, the total dollar value for mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in 2014 reached $226 billion, nearly four times the $62 billion total in 2013.

Among the 2014 M&As that were worth more than $5 billion (Table 1), there was a notable lack of biotech takeovers. Instead, these larger deals featured pharmaceutical companies swapping assets, including GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis, who traded their oncology and vaccines businesses, and Merck & Co., which divested its consumer operations to Bayer. The lone biotech acquisitions among these deals brought key marketed products to their acquirers. For Roche, the $8.3 billion it paid for InterMune brings in a potential blockbuster in the idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis market: the newly approved pirfenidone (Esbriet), which has sales of $1.6 billion forecasted by 2018. Meanwhile, by acquiring Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Merck gained the antibiotic daptomycin (Cubicin), which represented more than 90% of Cubist's 2013 global revenues. Generic versions of daptomycin, however, could be launched as early as next year, as Hospira won a lawsuit against Cubist that invalidated several Cubicin patents. Cubist did score an approval for another antibiotic, ceftolozane–tazobactam (Zerbaxa), for Gram-negative infections about a week after the Merck deal was announced though; analysts estimate the combination drug could reach $500 million to $1 billion in annual sales.

Table 1 Top mergers and acquisitions with value over US$5 billion in 2014
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Figure 1: Biopharma deal-making in 2014.

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  1. Informa, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, 10017, New York, USA

    Amanda Micklus & Steven Muntner

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  1. Amanda Micklus
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  2. Steven Muntner
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Correspondence to Amanda Micklus.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary information S1 (figure)

Distribution of the 23 mergers and acquisitions with a value greater than U$1 billionin 2014. (PDF 126 kb)

Supplementary information S2 (table)

Top 15 biopharma partnerships of 2014 by total deal value (PDF 138 kb)

Supplementary information S3 (figure)

Distribution of the partnerships in 2014 by research phase. (PDF 165 kb)

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Micklus, A., Muntner, S. Biopharma deal-making in 2014: a record year for M&A value. Nat Rev Drug Discov 14, 84–85 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd4536

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