More Consolidation in the Pharmaceutical Industry
Sepracor shareholders may be able to sleep better at night without the aid of the company’s top selling insomnia drug Lunesta after agreeing to be purchased on Thursday by Dainippon Sunmitomo Pharma of Japan. Dainippon will pay $2.6 billion for the rights to Lunesta and other drugs in Sepracor’s pipeline.
This is the third deal in the last two year involving the purchase of American pharmaceutical companies by Japanese drug makers seeking to aggressively expand their reach into the US drug markets. Last year, Takeda Pharmaceutical purchased Cambridge, MA-based Millenium Pharmaceuticals for $8.8 billion and Eisai brought MGI Pharma of Minnesota for $3.9 billion.
Sepracor, a specialty pharmaceutical company founded in 1984 focused on strategy of developing single isomers or chiral drugs and active metabolites of top selling drugs with the goal of developing a pipeline of proprietary pharmaceutical products. The company’s most successful product is Lunesta, a prescription sleep aid that had sales of almost $500 million in 2008.
Last January, the company layed off 20% of its workforce (350 sales reps, plus 410 contract sales reps) as Lunesta sales slumped because of competition from generic versions of Ambien and branded Ambien CR and revenue losses from its Xopenex COPD franchise. It isn’t clear whether or not more Sepracor will shed more jobs after the Dainippon deal closes sometime next year.
Stay tuned for updates!
Until next time...
Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) inked a deal yesterday with the Indian generics manufacturer Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories giving it access to over 100 future generic drugs and a gateway to Asia’s emerging pharmaceutical markets. The therapeutic areas covered under the agreement include diabetes, cardiovascular, pain management, gastroenterology and oncology. Dr Reddy’s Laboratories is one of India’s largest generic drug manufacturers. Like many of its competitors, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories also have active development programs for new biotechnology drugs and biosimilar products.
The old baseball adage which says that “you can’t tell the players apart without a program” is particularly apt when it comes to tracing the M &A activity that led to the creation of some today's largest pharmaceutical companies.
