March 19, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
For Celgene Corporation 2014 was the year of striking licensing deals. The cancer-drugmaker struck 10 deals last year, shelling out an average of $222 million in upfront payments to its partners, Bloomberg Business reported Thursday.
George Golumbeski, a senior vice president at Celgene, told Bloomberg the investments in the small biotech firms allows Celgene and its shareholders to benefit from the research and development conducted by those smaller companies. He told Bloomberg that innovative drug discovery works best when those small biotech companies are allowed to stay “nimble and in control of their own research.”
It’s a strategy that so far has been pleasing to investors with stock up nearly 60 percent since last year. Shares were trading up more than two points this morning.
Celgene’s deal making rivaled that of pharmaceutical giants Pfizer Inc. , Merck & Co. and AbbVie . Over the next two years Celgene will find out if its deal making will pay off with the results of multiple clinical trials.
The first test of those deals comes from Celgene’s Crohn’s Disease drug GED-0301 (mongersen), licensed from Nogra Pharma for $710 million with a promise of nearly $2 billion more in milestone payments. On Wednesday Celgene revealed PHASE II results showed patients were able to achieve significantly higher rates of remission, depending on the dosage amount versus a placebo.
The medication uses antisense technology to target a key intracellular signaling protein thought to be involved in intestinal inflammation. Celgene plans to move GED-0301 to Phase III trial. If results from that phase are as positive, Celgene’s partnership deals will show some vindication.
“GED-0301 offers a completely different mechanism of action that has the potential to transform the Crohn’s treatment landscape,” Scott Smith, president of Celgene Inflammation and Immunology, said in a press release.
Celgene is valued at $97 billion and currently has seven approved drugs on the market, including the company’s top cancer drug, Revlimid, which brought in $4.98 billion last year.
The base for Revlimid is thalidomide, a drug that garnered a bad reputation in the 1960s for causing birth defects. Celgene acquired the patent for thalidomide in 1992 and has transformed the drug’s reputation by adapting it for use as a therapy for the blood cancer multiple myeloma.
Celgene also has a seven year relationship with Acceleron Pharma Inc., which is currently moving clinical trials for two blood disorder drugs into Phase III.
Additional research and development deals include partnerships with NantBioscience, Nogra, OncoMed Pharmaceuticals, Inc. , PharmAkea Therapeutics, Presage, Quanticel, Pharmaceuticals, Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute, Sanofi, Sutro Biopharma, Tengion Inc., Triphase, Vaxon Biotech, VentiRx Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and more.
BioSpace Temperature Poll
After Amgen Inc. said last week that it will close its South San Francisco facility acquired during its $10 billion buyout of Onyx Pharmaceuticals and will lay off 300 of Oynx’s 750 workers, BioSpace is wondering—will the number of mergers and acquisitions completed in 2014 mean a “streamlining” of biotech jobs in the Bay Area? Tell us your thoughts.
