Drugmakers are placing multibillion-dollar bets on new medicines they expect will command premium prices and generate big sales.
France’s Sanofi SA
said Thursday it made an unsolicited, $9.3 billion offer to purchase San Francisco-based Medivation Inc.,
which sells a prostate-cancer drug that recently drew criticism
from members of Congress over its price tag. It is Sanofi’s latest
effort to expand its cancer-treatment business as sales of its older
drugs decline. Medivation’s board was scheduled to meet Thursday to
review the offer.
AbbVie Inc.
of North Chicago, Ill., agreed to pay $5.8 billion to acquire a
privately held cancer-drug developer, Stemcentrx Inc., of South San
Francisco, Calif., continuing AbbVie’s aggressive push to build an
oncology business. Stemcentrx’s investors include a venture-capital fund
founded by Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal Holdings Inc. and an early investor in Facebook Inc.
The flurry of deal activity surrounding cancer drugs comes
as politicians, doctors and health-insurance companies blast the
pharmaceutical industry for its pricing, particularly for new cancer
treatments with monthly costs that commonly exceed $10,000 a month patient.
Medivation’s Xtandi, a prostate-cancer drug introduced in 2012 that
costs about $129,000 a patient annually in the U.S. and had sales of
$1.9 billion last year. In March, several members of Congress sent a
letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, saying the
drug’s “unreasonably high cost” was limiting patient access.
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.
said Thursday that sales of its new immune-stimulating drug Opdivo
jumped to $704 million for the first quarter of 2016, from $40 million a
year earlier. The drug, launched in late 2014, costs per $12,500 a month patient, on average.
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