Sanofi has agreed to buy Kadmon Holdings for $1.9 billion, the latest in a string of acquisitions the French pharmaceutical giant has used to add new drugs and technologies to its portfolio.
The deal, announced Wednesday, has Sanofi paying $9.50 per share in cash for Kadmon, a roughly 77% premium to the biotech’s Tuesday closing price and 113% more than its average trading price over the last two months. The acquisition gives Sanofi rights to Rezurock, a drug for graft-versus-host disease the Food and Drug Administration approved in July.
The buyout is the sixth largest, and features the third highest premium, in what’s been a comparatively slow year for biotech buyouts, according to data from Biopharma Dive. It’s also the sixth acquisition by Sanofi since the beginning of last year, a flurry of activity worth some $10 billion and the most of any pharmaceutical company over that span.
Those deals have given Sanofi a variety of different assets, from a messenger RNA vaccine platform to “off-the-shelf” cell therapies, and together represent a push by the drugmaker to remake itself after pivoting from the cardiovascular and diabetes research for which it’s long been known. READ MORE
By Ben Fidler
Source: biopharmadive.com
CureVac and the University of Texas’s MD Anderson Cancer Center have announced a co-development and licensing agreement to develop novel messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA)-based cancer vaccines. The strategic collaboration will focus on the development of differentiated cancer vaccine candidates in selected haematological and solid tumour indications with high unmet medical needs.
FUJIFILM Corporation is planning to invest $1.2 billion to expand the planned FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies manufacturing facility in Holly Springs, North Carolina, US. This news follows the organisation’s announcement of a $2 billion investment in the facility in March 2021. This additional financial boost totals the investment to over $3.2 billion, FUJIFILM confirmed.
Sanofi’s global restructuring and downsizing is now fully underway, with layoffs stretching to the company’s Belgian offices. Belgian newspaper De Tijd reports that 67 employees have been laid off at a site in Ghent and 32 jobs are on the chopping block at Sanofi’s Belgium HQ in Diegem.
