Mallinckrodt has made its second buy of the year–and the company believes it’s the perfect match for its first purchase.
The Irish drugmaker agreed to fork over about $1.33 billion to investment firm The Gores Group for immunotherapy maker Therakos in a deal that should bolster its hospital offerings. Therakos specializes in extracorporeal photopheresis, a form of therapy approved to treat symptoms associated with a common form of skin cancer.
The acquisition fits “hand-in-glove” with Mallinckrodt’s ($MNK) previous deal–a $2.3 billion purchase of Ikaria that brought it access to a respiratory med for babies in neonatal ICUs, execs said on a conference call, as quoted by Reuters. Mallinckrodt can reach out to medical establishments already using that treatment–dubbed INOmax–to help build demand for Therakos’ devices, which they forecast could haul in $500 million or more per year.
The pact may come as no surprise to some industry watchers. Mallinckrodt has been on an M&A spree lately, last year shelling out $5.8 billion for Questcor Pharmaceuticals–and its controversial multiple sclerosis med H.P. Acthar Gel–and inking a pact to lay down $1.6 billion for Cadence Pharmaceuticals just two months before that. And Moody’s, for one, last month predicted the Dublin drugmaker would continue to build up its hospital products business, purchasing companies with injectables or other drugs used in a hospital setting.
And Mallinckrodt may not stop there. With a limited internal pipeline in its branded business, the company will “likely continue to make acquisitions in order to drive long-term growth,” the investor service wrote in a recent report. But while competitors like Endo ($ENDP) will be able to look to M&A-related synergies for profit-margin gains, Mallinckrodt will likely need to find its own in internal restructuring and shifts in product mix, the Moody’s report predicted.
By Carly Helfand
