DotW: You Can Get Anything You Want At IN VIVO Blog

This post is called Deals of the Week, and it's about deals, and the week, but Deals of the Week is not the name of the blog, that's just the name of the post. And that's why I called the post Deals of the Week.

You can get anything you want at IN VIVO Blog.
You can get anything you want at IN VIVO Blog.
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You can get anything you want at IN VIVO Blog.

Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago, two years ago on Thanksgiving, when Chris Morrison and I started writin' a blog about deals, but not every day, just once a week. And writin' about deals once a week, you know it's a lot of work. (Hint. Hint.) And there's a lot of garbage you gotta sift through, but we decided it would be a friendly gesture on behalf of readers.

So we trolled around the Internet with our shovels and rakes and other implements of destruction (aka Elsevier Business Intelligence's Strategic Transactions database) looking for deals to analyze. But then a big bad editor (also known as Officer Roger) said why are you doin' that? We are closed on Thanksgiving.

And we had never heard of a blog closed on Thanksgiving before (we don't get out much) so with tears in our eyes we drove off into the sunset looking for another place to dump our garbage -- I mean our deals.

We didn't find one. So we wrote our post anyway, went back and had a Thanksgiving Day that couldn't be beat, went to sleep, and didn't get up until the next morning when we got a call from Officer Roger...

And it's been a recurring feature here at IVB ever since. (Fortunately, not another case of American blind justice since we always arrive at the truth of the matter and it doesn't even require 27 eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.)

In honor of the day, we hope you consider joining the IN VIVO Blog Movement. All you've got to do is walk into the office wherever you are, just walk in and say ,"You can get anything you want at IN VIVO Blog." And walk out.

You know if one person, just one person does it, they might think he's really sick and they won't take him... And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day (okay, we'd really like 1000) walking in, quoting a line from IN VIVO Blog and walking out?

And friends, they might think its a movement. And that's what it is, the IN VIVO Blog Movement.

Remember Deals of the Week? (This is a post about Deals of the Week.) Without further ado, we bring you this week's installment inspired by Arlo Guthrie. Feel free to sing along in four-part harmony. With feeling. 'Cuz you can get anything you want at the IN VIVO Blog. (Excepting Roger.)

Clovis Oncology/Clavis Pharma: What's a letter of the alphabet between friends? Pat Mahaffy and his former Pharmionites at Clovis have started to spend the huge $145 million A round they announced in May. Their first deal is for intravenous CP-4126, what they hope to be an improved version of Eli Lilly's Gemzar, under development at Norwegian firm Clavis.

Clovis is paying $15 million upfront and up to $365 million in milestones to take over clinical trials in pancreatic cancer and other indications and develop a companion diagnostic. Clovis gets rights in the Americas and Europe and will double enrollment to 250 patients in a recently launched Phase 2 for newly-diagnosed advanced pancreatic cancer. Clavis's proprietary platform adds a lipid vector to existing drugs that, if early data bears out, will boost efficacy without adding safety concerns.

For CP-4126, the proposition is to boost uptake of gemcitabine in patients who fare poorly on the parent drug because they have low levels of a nucleoside transporter protein known as hENT1 required for entry into tumor cells. The lipid vector allows gemcitabine to bypass hENT1 and find another way into the cell, Clavis officials say. No doubt careful attention will be paid to the low-hENT1 population in Phase II studies. Pay careful attention, too, to Clovis, to see how far $145 million can take a specialty-focused cancer startup these days. Let's see, $15 million upfront, plus clinical trial costs (including the diagnostic development), plus milestones to Clavis, plus operations in three locations (Boulder, Colo., San Francisco, London), plus other deals the firm no doubt wants to do...it adds up fast. With its mid-recession A round, Clovis showed it could buck economic trends. Will we see a B round soon? As Clavis CEO Geir Christian Melen told "The Pink Sheet" DAILY this week, Clovis's Mahaffy has "strong shareholders with deep pockets." -- Alex Lash

Novartis/Incyte: To whet your appetite for the multi-layered yumminess of turducken, official Thanksgiving Beast of the IN VIVO Blog, check out the deal Incyte announced this week.
It's not just two drugs wrapped into one deal, it's two kinds of upfront cash! Novartis is paying a $150 million signing fee plus an immediate $60 million milestone for rights to two compounds, an oral JAK1/JAK2 inhibitor in Phase III for myelofibrosis, and an oral cMET inhibitor about to enter Phase 1 for multiple cancers. The $60 million is a reward for INCB18424, the JAK inhibitor, having started Phase 3 in July of this year. Novartis gets ex-U.S. marketing rights to the compound in all hematology-oncology indications and will pay tiered, double-digit royalties. Incyte keeps rights in the States as well as rights in the psoriasis indication. For the cMET inhibitor, INCB28060, Novartis takes over worldwide development after Phase 1 and also has worldwide commercial rights with royalties back to Incyte. Incyte also keeps a co-development and co-promotion option on the compound. Total biobucks for the deal could top $1 billion, though with the cMET inhibitor so early in development, chances of Novartis paying every last dollar are roughly the same as seeing a turducken in the wild. -- Alex Lash

Jubilant/University of Alabama/Southern Research Institute: These days drug makers are looking to trim their overly fat infrastructure even as they bulk up on much needed pipeline products. How best to do this while maintaining a lean budget? One increasingly popular approach is to leverage the lower cost innovation available in India and China. (FIPNets!) Another is to take advantage of the knowledge within the world's ivory towers--in other words, deals with academia. In an interesting twist on the virtual R&D model, Jubilant Organosys, one of the go-to India companies for major pharma players, is seeking out innovation by forging ties with the University of Alabama and Southern Research Institute to develop new meds in the oncology, metabolic disease, and infectious disease space. The press release calls it "a unique US-India arbitraged and leveraged partnership." So based on the trickle down economics theory of deal affordability, transactions with emerging-market players provide pharmas more generous terms than with US or European biotechs, but partnerships with academia are an even better bargain. (What about deals with Indian or Chinese universities?) This is the second academic partnership Jubilant has signed this month--it inked an agreement with Duke University on Nov.10 to translate Duke discoveries into new medicines. Specific financial details of the most recent tie-up with UAB/SRI weren't disclosed. But the three groups are definitely working together to identify and develop the most promising targets discovered at their various organizations with the goal of shepherding programs through Phase II before out-licensing to other drug makers. Should a partnership materialize, revenues stemming from these alliances--presumably milestones and royalty streams--will be distributed to the three investment participants in some fashion. -- Ellen Licking

Cephalon/Ception: Okay, it's not really a "no deal"; the Cephalon/Ception transaction is more accurately described as a "no deal yet." That's because Cephalon is extending (we'd say postponing) its option-to-acquire Ception Therapeutics after a Phase II/III study of the smaller co's lead compound, reslizumab, yielded disappointing results in treating the rare autoinflammatory disease eosinophilic esophagitis (EE). Recall that way back in January, Cephalon acquired the rights to buy Ception for $250 million on top of a healthy $100 million upfront pending a positive outcome in the EE trial. It's possible the deal may still come to fruition -- reslizumab isn't leftover turkey, yet -- but now Ception has to prove the drug has the goods (i.e. Phase II data) in a different indication, eosinophilic asthma, before Cephalon ponies up the money. Results from these asthma studies are expected to be revealed sometime in the first quarter of 2010.

There's no question reslizumab, an anti-interleukin 5 monoclonal antibody, is an important asset to Cephalon. It's one of the company’s only near-term pipeline opportunities given the pending genericization of Provigil. Indeed, Cephalon execs highlighted reslizumab and its expected mid-2010 BLA filing as a near-term growth driver during a recent R&D day. It's also clear Cephalon is hitching its wagon to therapeutics that treat inflammation. In addition to the Ception transaction, in the past year the company has inked three deals in the space, with ImmuPharma, Arana, and most recently BioAssets. -- Jessica Merrill and Ellen Licking