Pfizer says it will purchase biotechnology upstart Medivation for $14 billion in cash. The main prize in the deal: Medivation’s prostate cancer drug, Xtandi, which costs $120,000 a year and generated $2.2 billion in sales over its last four quarters.
The deal also gets Pfizer a second, experimental drug for a rare form of breast cancer, talozaparib, that prevents cancer cells from repairing their DNA. A similar medicine from a small company called Tesaro recently succeeded in ovarian cancer, and, during the bidding process, Medivation chief executive David Hung has argued that the drug could be even bigger than Xtandi.
