Amgen to buy Micromet for $1.6 billion for leukemia drug
Amgen Inc., the world’s largest biotechnology company, agreed to buy Micromet Inc. in a $1.16 billion deal to gain an experimental leukemia drug.
Investors of Micromet, based in Rockville, Maryland, will get $11 a share, the companies said in a statement today. The acquisition will give Thousand Oaks, California-based Amgen the compound blinatumomab, being tested against two blood cancers, acute lymphoblastic leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
While Amgen spends $2.7 billion a year on research and development, the company has “a fairly empty pipeline” and needs to acquire to gain promising new products, said Geoffrey Porges, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein in New York.
“This isn’t the end of the acquisitiveness” for Amgen, Porges said in a telephone interview. “This is consistent with Amgen’s swing for the fences’ worldview, and is consistent with both the opportunity and perils of that view.”
Micromet rose $2.73, or 33 percent, to $11.01 at 8:37 a.m. New York time in trading before markets open. The biotechnology company has increased 23 percent in the 12 months before today. Amgen shares fell 2 cents to $69.19, after gaining 21 percent in the previous 12 months.
Porges declined to ascribe a value to blinatumomab until he’s seen the results of ongoing phase 2 trials.
The next set of data for blinatumomab is expected at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting in June 2011, wrote Robyn Karnauskas, an analyst for Deutsche Bank Securities in New York, in a note to investors.
It’s unclear whether the drug will receive accelerated approval from the Food and Drug Administration, wrote Karnauskas, saying the acquisition is outside Amgen’s “core expertise” area.
In a June trial, nine of 12 patients on blinatumomab reached complete remission from acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer that affects about 5,760 people in the U.S. each year.
The Amgen offer values Micromet at about 31 times revenue, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That compares with a median of about 6.7 for almost 40 comparable deals since 2007.
There have been more than 260 U.S. takeovers in Micromet’s industry over the past five years, with the largest being Roche Holding AG’s $47 billion purchase ofGenentech Inc. in 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The acquisition will be discussed in more detail on a conference call scheduled after fourth-quarter earnings are released when the market closes today, Amgen said in the statement.
Amgen, with a market value of $60.6 billion, declared its first quarterly dividend last year, and announced a $10 billion buyback program, promising to return more value to stockholders.
Amgen’s largest deal in the past five years until now was its $425 million purchase of BioVex Group Inc. in 2010 for its experimental cancer drugs. One of the BioVex drugs, Oncovex for skin cancer, is in late-stage testing along with trebananib, for ovarian cancer, and ganitumab, a therapy for pancreatic cancer, according to data collected by Bloomberg.
