The pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. and the biotech startup Prometheus Bisciences announced an agreement reached: Merck will acquire all the shares of Prometheus at a price of $200 per share. Considering the close of Prometheus stock trading on Friday at $114.01 per share, it turns out that the company with a capitalization of $5.4 billion, the pharmaceutical giant intends to buy at a price of two times higher: $10.8 billion.
The companies announced one of the largest deals in the pharmaceutical market in recent years in official statements on their websites. They also said the deal is subject to approval by Prometheus shareholders: a meeting with them is scheduled for April 17.
Under the terms of the agreement, Merck will acquire all outstanding shares of Prometheus through a subsidiary. Closing of the proposed transaction will be subject to a number of conditions, including antitrust law requirements. The process is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2023.
Morgan Stanley acted as financial advisor to Merck in the transaction and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison acted as legal advisor to Merck. Prometheus was financial advisor to Centerview Partners and Goldman Sachs, and legal advisor to Latham & Watkins,
Prometheus is a biotechnology company that develops innovative drugs for the treatment of immune-mediated diseases such as ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease and other autoimmune disorders.
The company currently has the Prometheus360™ precision medicine platform, a machine learning-based analytical product with one of the world’s largest bioinformatics databases and a prototype drug, PRA023.
“The agreement with Prometheus will accelerate our development in the field of immunology,” said Merck Chairman and CEO Robert Davis. “This transaction brings diversity to our portfolio and is an important component in the process of creating a sustainable innovation engine that will fuel our growth for the next decade.”
The corporation decided to bet on immunology as 2028 nears, when patent protection for Keytruda, a cancer drug that accounted for nearly half of Merck’s $21 billion in sales of $59.3 billion, expires. last year.
Experts believe that it is the anticipation of this event that prompts Merck to look for promising biotech companies to buy and develop in various areas of pharmacology.
In the fall of 2022, as Kommersant recalls, the pharmaceutical giant acquired another biotech company, Imago BioSciences, for $1.4 billion. This startup develops drugs for the treatment of diseases of the bone marrow and blood.
The company also bought cancer drug maker ArQule for $2.7 billion and Acceleron Pharma, a developer of experimental high blood pressure drugs, for $11.5 billion.
Author:
Ekaterina Alipova
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
