How's this for a sign of the times: One of the most innovative
drug industry deals of the year involves the biggest firm of them all,
Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE), but it isn't its $68 billion takeover of Wyeth. Instead,
the pundits at
Windhover Research's In Vivo blog say Pfizer is breaking new ground in its joint venture with rival GlaxoSmithKline plc (NYSE:GSK).
The two firms said last month they would pool their HIV/AIDS programs
into one entity. Ownership is split 85/15 in favor of Glaxo, which
through its ancestors has been working on HIV for nearly as long as the
disease has been known. But Glaxo has lost its prominence to Gilead
Sciences Inc. (NASDAQ:GILD), a San Francisco Bay Area biotech that through R&D
and dealmaking has grown its franchise with ever-new combinations of
"cocktail" drugs.
The as-yet-unnamed JV, which gets out of the gate with 11 marketed
drugs and six more in development, is for many reasons the "most
innovative deal ... so far this year," writes Windhover's Roger Longman.
It unlocks the assets from the companies' bureaucracies, creates
managerial and scientific independence -- so Longman says -- and it
gives employees the financial incentive of a possible public offering
(though not in the current economic climate).
Longman says it's a model other pharmas should follow, but in a sense
the model has already been established -- by Pfizer itself. It's the
third unit the firm has spun out into a new entity in the past year
while keeping a stake. In 2008, it found a group of VCs to take
Esperion Therapeutics -- which Pfizer bought earlier in the decade for
$1 billion -- then did the same with its Nagoya, Japan, laboratory, now
independent and renamed RaQualia Pharma Inc. Stay tuned to The Deal
for more on Pfizer's under-the-radar divestment strategy.
- Alex Lash
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Juergen Lasowski
And the winners are...
And Glaxo helped Gilead on its way back in the 1980s when it licensed Gilead's oligo technology.