Eisai to buy biotech Morphotek
pharmafile | March 23, 2007 | News story | Sales and Marketing |Â Â Eisai, biotechÂ
Eisai is to acquire Morphotek for $325 million, making it the latest pharma company to buy outright a biotech company to bolster its in-house expertise and pipeline.
Based in Pennsylvania in the US, Morphotek has worked with a number of major pharma companies, generating cell lines to support the development of biotech products at GSK, Amgen and other leading companies.
The company is also developing molecules in-house, and specialises in cancer, its most advanced candidates are MORAb-003, in phase I/II for ovarian cancer, and MORAb-009, in phase I for pancreatic cancer.
Eisai recently acquired four products in the oncology field from Ligand, and the Morphotek acquisition is aimed at helping it to compete in the increasingly important fields of biotechnology and cancer therapies.
Eisai’s move follows a flurry of similar acquisitions of cutting-edge biotech companies by large pharma. Until recently, large pharma had be satisfied to simply in-license the most promising drug candidates emerging from biotech, but many have now moved to bring the biotech expertise and technology in-house.
Notable examples include AstraZeneca acquiring CAT, Pfizer buying PowderMed and GSK’s purchase of Domantis.
As with these acquisitions, Eisai has pledged to allow Morphotek to retain its autonomy within the Eisai group, a move seen as vital to preserving the benefits of a small drug discovery team.
Morphotek’s chief executive and co-founder Nicholas Nicolaides said Eisai’s substantial intellectual and managerial resources would help Morphotek to accelerate the development of its existing pipeline, as well as new clinical compounds from other research collaborations, and from Eisai research.
Eisai’s chief executive Haruo Naito said: “I sincerely respect Dr. Nicolaides’ innovative and courageous endeavor in developing human monoclonal antibody therapeutics. He has made a tremendous contribution to that effort.
“By combining Morphotek’s proprietary technologies and promising therapeutic antibodies with Eisai’s existing research programmes and infrastructure, we will be able to meet our goal of addressing the unmet medical needs of patients, especially cancer patients, all around the world.
“Morphotek’s rich pipeline, unique and proprietary antibody generation technology platform, and highly skilled management and scientific team will become the core of our R&D efforts in biologics.”
Once the acquisition is completed, Morphotek will become part of Eisai’s global discovery and development research network, which includes laboratories in Japan, Europe and the U.S.
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