After a tedious game of playing hard to get, Human Genome Sciences has finally fallen into the arms of partner GlaxoSmithKline, which will pay $14.25 a share or $3 billion, including cash and debt, $1.25 more per share and $400 million more in total than GSK’s offered back in April. In this long and troubled courtship, there are morals for the use of genetic data to discover drugs, a strategy which remains one of the most likely ways to improve the lackluster success rates of pharmaceutical research labs, and of the mechanics of how companies partner with and buy out one another.
