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
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