Mergers and acquisitions continue to be on big pharmaceutical companies agendas

With the depressed value in share price of script in Starpharma.....one continues to speculate on it being gobbled up by big pharma. Remember the likes of Allan Gray, Fidelity and M&G make up a close to 30% of share registry. Could be a large pay day ahead if a couple of the wannabes are sniffing and Starpharma comes into play with its drug delivery platform

Below is another example of M&A activity


Roche joins the M&A game, closing in on a deal to buy gene therapy pioneer Spark for $5B — report Spark CEO Jeffrey Marrazzo at an Endpoints News panel during the 2019 JP Morgan conference Jeff Rumans, Endpoints News
Roche is joining the multibillion-dollar M&A game.

The Wall StreetJournal is reporting that the pharma giant is close to buying gene therapy pioneer Spark Therapeutics for $5 billion, a big premium for the biotech — if you look past the big slide it’s seen in market cap since last summer. Spark’s market cap right below the $2 billion mark. There could be a last-minute hitch, though, as the Journal notes that at least one other bidder was in the game on Friday. A buyout, which the report says could be announced Monday morning or sooner, would give Roche one of the leading gene therapies in the clinic for hemophilia, signaling their intent to remain at the top of a market where it’s scored big with its blockbuster new drug Hemlibra. Spark has been widely viewed as playing catch-up to BioMarin on hemophilia, with both companies working to convince analysts that they can deliver a durable, once-and-done cure for the rare disorder. That’s no easy task. The deal helps highlight a popular new trend in biopharma, as the big players demonstrate a growing appetite for deals now that biotech valuations have been cut down to a more easily swallowed size. Spark’s shares closed at $51.56 on Friday, well below the $82.71 mark that it hit last June. In the last few months we’ve seen Bristol-Myers strike a deal to buy Celgene for $74 billion, Eli Lilly bagged Loxo for $8 billion, with a $5 billion Tesaro acquisition by GlaxoSmithKline and smaller deals like the $300 million Merck agreed to pay for Immune Design. Add it all up and that comes to $92 billion-plus. Anything up to $8 billion or so represents a bolt-on for the likes of Roche, which has disavowed any interest in mega-mergers. Launched just 6 years ago, Spark picked up its initial pipeline from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, making it an overnight leader in one of the hottest — and most contested — fields in biotech. While gene therapy deals have been multiplying, including the multibillion-dollar pact that AbbVie announced with Voyager on Friday, there’s still plenty of controversy over the pricing of these new drugs. Spark won the first FDA approval for a gene therapy with Luxturna, which it priced at $850,000. Developers now are angling closer to $2 million to $3 million per treatment for this first wave of gene therapies, though they also face some hard blowback from ICER and payer groups.