Deals Of The Week Presents Last Week's Deals

Not to go all eschatological on you, but this blogger owes the IVB readership a confession. Religious broadcaster Harold Camping's exhortations (and innumerable billboards and emails) announcing May 21, 2011 as the onset of the Rapture and the ensuing end-of-days offered this blogger an excuse to book out early to enjoy a last supper with friends and family. (At which there was much speculation about the soon-to-be revealed identities of the four horsemen.)

In the blogger's defense, the signs were all there. (And no, we aren't talking about cataclysmic earthquakes, the rise of either false prophets (Beck or Trump?) or the Mississippi River, or the sky-rocketing home prices in the Bay Area tied to LinkedIn's IPO.) How can you deny it's not the end of the world, when the Cleveland Indians are leading their division, Oprah's pulling the plug on her daily tv show, and reality stars like Jersey Shore's Snooki command speaking fees higher than Nobel prize winning writers?

Thus, in the hopes of cramming celebratory fun into the final hours of May 20 (we had until 11pm PT by dear Harold's calculations), DOTW seemed a wee bit, well, unnecessary.

In the face of Armageddon, who really cares about Shire's decision to diversify into regenerative medicine with its non earn-out purchase of Advanced BioHealing? (Dermagraft, after all, can't be used to treat the gnashing of teeth.) And, really, with the world absolutely ending on Oct. 21, it's not like Takeda needs Nycomed to bridge its 2012 Actos patent cliff. (Now if Nycomed sold an OTC product to repair the rending of hair, we might pay attention given its apocalyptic best-seller potential.)

Oh wait, it's Monday May 23-- and we're still here (and so is everyone else). Damn. That means we'll be writing this column until at least December 21, 2012, which REALLY, TRULY is the end of days. With apologies for our tardiness, it's time for another edition of...

Takeda/Nycomed: The Rapture may not have come to pass but Takeda/Nycomed did. On May 19, after a week of speculation and a press release warning journos not to get too hasty, Takeda announced its €9.6 billion ($13.6 billion) purchase of privately-held Nycomed. As IN VIVO Blog told you last week, the deal satisfies a number of strategic and financial imperatives for Japan's largest drugmaker, as it faces generic competition to best-selling diabetes drug Actos from 2012 and seeks to expand its footprint beyond Japan and the U.S. The deal doubles the Japanese firm's European sales, jump-starts its emerging markets presence and provide an immediate 30% revenue boost, increasing operating income by more than 40%, according to the company. Swiss-based Nycomed brings to Takeda not only the fruits of recently-launched chronic obstructive pulmonary disease drug Daxas, but also a more diversified product mix, including OTC and branded generics, regulatory expertise, and an entrepreneurial culture that Takeda President and CEO Yasuchika Hasegawa said he hoped could "vitalize" his firm. As such, the deal helps accelerate the 2011-2013 mid-range growth plan unveiled by Hasegawa earlier this month. The transaction – worth slightly more than initial reports suggested – values the Swiss-based Nycomed at about 3.4 times its 2010 revenues, excluding its U.S dermatology business, which is not part of the deal. The higher price tag means Takeda will take a ¥600-700 billion ($7.33 billion to $8.55 billion) loan to finance the deal, which is the largest yet in the Japanese firm's aggressive ongoing bid to expand its presence and pipeline through M&A. --Melanie Senior

Shire/Advanced BioHealing: Shire/Advanced BioHealing marks the return of the IPO as a stalking horse, a private M&A deal with NO earn-outs, and an ROI greater than 10x for certain investors. True venture like returns --it must be the end of days!! Just before its planned debut on the New York Stock Exchange, Advanced BioHealing instead agreed to a $750 million all cash offer from the specialty pharma Shire, which has a history of using acquisitions to jump quickly into new lines of business. With ABH, Shire dives into regenerative medicine, grabbing the commercial product Dermagraft, a patch that uses natural cells called fibroblasts to heal diabetic foot ulcers. (Dermagraft has a long and painful history, which you can read about in greater detail here.) The current deal builds on Shire's willingness to pay healthy premiums for companies that it sees as cornerstones to new lines of business. The most striking example is Shire's 2005 purchase of Transkaroytic Therapeutics for $1.6 billion, an acquisition that gave the pharma access to enzyme-replacement drugs for rare diseases and a technology platform for further growth. As part of Shire, ABH will be run as a semi-autonomous unit, with retention of top management one of the hoped for outcomes post-integration. The all-cash offer was a 25.6% premium to the amount ABH was expected to raise had it debuted at $15-a-share, the midpoint of its expected range. Since the IPO was reportedly oversubscribed and pricing was on the upswing, a public debut might have resulted in a larger return to investors -- eventually. Still, ABH's backers, which included Canaan Partners and Safeguard Scientific had to be more than satisfied with the terms-- and certainty of exit --offered by the Shire take-out. Canaan apparently reaped a 15x return on the deal, while Safeguard's ROI was a not too shabby 13x. -- Alex Lash and EL

Roche/Merck:The two current heavyweights in hepatitis C therapy got together May 17 with a plan to co-promote Merck’s newly approved protease inhibitor Victrelis , in what was widely viewed as an effort to squeeze upstart Vertex Pharmaceuticals out of the HCV market despite superior efficacy data for its protease inhibitor, Incivek. Boceprevir was approved by FDA on May 13; telaprevir's PDUFA date is today, May 23. Under the non-exclusive agreement, Roche reps will include boceprevir as part of their promotion to health care providers on the use of Pegasys in triple combination therapy for HCV. Pegasys, part of the current two-drug backbone of HCV therapy, commands about 80% of the peg-interferon market in HCV, far ahead of Merck’s competing product, PEG-Intron. Roche will not bundle boceprevir with Pegasys, however, and the deal does not preclude Merck from marketing its HCV drugs in a discounted bundle. (Nor does it preclude Roche from inking a deal with Vertex though analysts think that's unlikely.) The two peg-interferon products will continue to be marketed separately, both companies said, and Merck added that the collaboration will not affect the pharma’s economics for its new product. Merck and Roche, each of which has other HCV compounds in clinical development, also will test their compounds together in combination therapy trials.--Joseph Haas

Stryker/Orthovita: Yes, dear readers, a device deal, which means the rapture must be coming (even though Harold Camping's calculations this time around were off). In 2010 IN VIVO wondered if Orthovita, hit hard by scientific debate about the merits of vertebral compression fracture treatment and allegations of fraud, was giving up its grand dreams. Thanks to Stryker’s $316 million acquisition last week, its independent efforts at becoming the specialty spine player are over. But with a take-out price tag that included a 41% premium, did Orthovita's investors win? The deal allows Stryker to pair its existing hardware with Orthovita’s Vitoss bone graft and Cortoss bone filler. The former can be used along with Stryker’s spinal implants while the latter might serve as a hook to help sell Stryker’s new vertebral augmentation products, giving the med-tech giant another way to differentiate itself from Medtronic’s line of Kyphoplasty products, which use traditional bone cement polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA.)If Orthovita’s products live on, it's fair to say the company never recovered from a series of er, crushing (compressing?) blows. First, in 2009, New England Journal of Medicine published two studies suggesting vertebroplasty – the filling of fractured vertebra with cement (or Cortoss) – wasn’t an effective method of relieving pain from vertebral compression fractures. The studies were published just two months after the company received FDA approval for Cortoss. Then a Medicare fraud investigation by Department of Justice forced vertebral compression procedures to move from in-patient – where Orthovita’s Vitoss and other materials are currently used -- to outpatient settings. The shift caused problems with pricing and, analysts say, distracted Vitoss sales reps. In the end, economic pressures that have been a drag on the entire orthopedics sector also weighed heavily on Orthovita, which had high hopes that Cortoss sales would quickly ramp total sales to $300 million annually. -- Tom Salemi

ThermoFisher/Phadia: The European private equity firm, Cinven, is to exit ownership of the Swedish in vitro diagnostics company, Phadia, after four years by selling it to Thermo Fisher Scientific, reportedly more than trebling its investment in the process. US laboratory equipment manufacturer Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. aims to strengthen its allergy and autoimmune disease diagnostics business by acquiring Phadia for a hefty €2.47 billion ($3.5 billion) in cash, announced May 19. (In case you are keeping track, Phadia was spun out of Pharmacia in 2004 when Pfizer acquired the parent company, and was acquired by Cinven in 2007 in a deal that valued the company at €1.285 billion.) Phadia markets complete blood test systems to support the clinical diagnosis and monitoring of allergy and autoimmune diseases and chalked up 2010 revenues totaling €367 million thanks to strong sales in Europe and emerging markets. Thermo Fisher is using a mixture of debt financing from Barclays Capital and cash to fund the Phadia acquisition, which is expected to complete in the fourth quarter, and be immediately accretive to Thermo Fisher's adjusted earnings per share. The deal completes a busy week for Thermo Fisher, which completed its $2.1 billion acquisition of Dionex on May 17 and one day later announced the $35 million purchase of UK player Sterilin.--John Davis

Image courtesy of flickrer WarmSleepy via a creative commons license.

2010 M&A DOTY Nominee: Abbott/ Piramal

It's time for the IN VIVO Blog's Third Annual Deal of the Year! competition. This year we're presenting awards in three categories to highlight the most interesting and creative deal making solutions of the year. The categories are: M&A Deal of the Year, Alliance Deal of the Year, and Exit/Financing Deal of the Year. We'll supply the nominations (four or five in each category throughout December) and you, the voting public, will decide the winners (by voting early and often, commencing once we've announced all the nominees). Strap yourselves in, it's The Race for the Roger™.


Tennyson? Maybe he's an OK mascot for academic-industry deal-maker types. Rudyard Kipling, however, best characterizes Abbott's recent full-blown attack on the Indian pharma market, with his quote: "Gardens are not made by saying 'Oh, how beautiful' and sitting in the shade." Clearly, a message Abbott executives took to heart when inking the whopping $3.72 billlion deal ($2.1 billion in cash) they made in May 2010 to buy the branded generics business of Piramal Healthcare - a valuation that is an unheard of nine-times sales and 31 times earnings.

The deal, which put India's fourth largest pharma company under Abbott's wing, has kept global biopharma tongues wagging for months about over-heated valuations in emerging markets, and in particular, of course, India, as well as Big Pharma's true long-term intentions in Asia versus their short-term opportunistic motivations. It catapulted Abbott, which until last year could be diagnosed as emerging-markets deficient, into the number one spot in India. That's a steep climb from 2009, when it barely cracked the high teens, and puts it ahead of MNC India virtuosos like GSK and Sanofi. Abbott's move changed not only Abbott, however, but the entire Indian pharmaceutical landscape forever - surely the kind of transformative event that should be at the top of any dealmaker's DOTY award list.

So, what did Abbott get for its generosity? A portfolio of 350 branded generics which its newly formed Established Products Business Unit (haven't we seen similar renditions at Pfizer and AstraZeneca, among others?) will sell in India and some other emerging markets; a large, somewhat bloated sales force, with a strong presence in rural districts, and a 4% share of a very fragmented market - bringing Abbott's new total share to 7%.

Analysts say that with this deal, Abbott can move into the center of the Indian drug market and play a bigger role in its rapidly unfolding growth story. Piramal has a large number of mass-consumption products, which Abbott could not easily create from scratch in a fast-moving market, and Abbott will also be able to sell its own brands, as well as the Piramal products, which are largely in CNS, cardiovascular, and respiratory diseases. Oh, and the new Abbott's pro forma growth is projected at 13.2%, which is stunning for Western eyes, although actually below the overall growth rate of 17.5%.

India is in the midst of an M&A frenzy, which started with Daiichi Sankyo's $4.6 billion purchase of Ranbaxy generics in 2008. Even that huge effort pales in comparison to what Abbott has wrought. Before Abbott, three of the top four pharma companies in India were Indian-owned, but now that number is whittled down to one: Cipla.

If the aim of DOTY is to reward a deal-maker's brashness and recognize a company that puts its money where its mouth is, vote for Abbott-Piramal.

2010 Alliance DOTY Nominee: Pfizer/Biocon

It's time for the IN VIVO Blog's Third Annual Deal of the Year! competition. This year we're presenting awards in three categories to highlight the most interesting and creative deal making solutions of the year. The categories are: M&A Deal of the Year, Alliance Deal of the Year, and Exit/Financing Deal of the Year. We'll supply the nominations (four or five in each category throughout December) and you, the voting public, will decide the winners (by voting early and often, commencing once we've announced all the nominees). Strap yourselves in, it's The Race for the Roger™


OK, it may not be the biggest DOTY or even the most creative in terms of structure. The terms are pretty plain vanilla - Pfizer pays $200M upfront to Indian biotech Biocon and an additional $150M in development and regulatory milestones, plus payments tied to commercialization. In exchange, it gets rights to sell Biocon's portfolio of biosimilar insulins throughout most of the world. Thus, this ain't the kind of deal that inspires heady talk in the biz dev community, which is more likely to eye the latest fancy risk-sharing schemes.

While the structure of Pfizer/Biocon is quite traditional, the concept is anything but. Indeed, the union of these two companies is, in fact, blatantly ambitious and could have far reaching implications. It demostrates a new way of doing business for pharma, touching on an battery of industry hot topics: biosimilars, pricing flexibility, diversification and emerging markets. Because of its conceptual radicalism, it is by far the best choice to win the DOTY award.

The alliance brings together two diametrically opposed companies that have surprisingly complementary interests: big, unwieldy Pfizer, which lacks a presence in diabetes, and Biocon, an aggressive, comparatively small Indian biotech, which, while far from naive, has limited global operations and ambitions to develop an oral insulin.

Pfizer now will sell all of Biocon's biosimilar insulins and insulin analogs, including recombinant human insulin, Glargine, Aspart and Lispro; in Germany, Malaysia, and India only, the partners will share commercial responsibilities. Biocon is in charge of global manufacturing, development and regulatory approvals. The partners assert -- and there's really no other word to describe their pitch - their broad portfolio will enble them to challenge the industry's diabetes mainstays. Take that, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, and Lilly.

The deal was spearheaded by two aggressive business leaders who think outside the box: David Simmons, who has headed Pfizer's $10B Established Products Business Unit and recently took over Emerging Markets as well, and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, chairman of Biocon . Simmons has spent the past two years scouring Asia and elsewhere for inexpensive outsouring opportunities to buttress his units' generics business, but the Biocon alliance is different and more strategic than his unit's previous deals with Indian generics manufacturers Aurobindo and Claris.

With insulin, Pfizer is plunging into the biosimilars fray. Simmons has said previously that Pfizer wants to play in this space, but until now, he hasn't articulated just how it will do so. By teaming up with Biocon, he's indicating Pfizer's willingness to essentially outsource its approach to this new business opportunity with an up-and-coming EM player.

For Biocon, too, the deal represents new territory. India's budding biotech industry is just that --budding -- and often seems to be stalled. Biocon, however, has stood out as an exception, with its long-time efforts to become a global innovator, backed by self-generated revenues from more traditional, lower margin businesses, such as contract research and drug development services, as well as sales of generic biologics to domestic markets. Like Simmons, Shaw seems intent on pushing beyond her company's comfort zone.

Timing is a key virtue of this deal - the partners have some -- not much - breathing room because they will roll out the insulins gradually. They won't discuss their regulatory strategy in the US, where they hope to launch in 2015, but FDA officials say the agency is "open for business" when it comes to biosimilars, despite lack of formal guidance in this area.

Emerging markets is the wild West of pharma these days, but Pfizer and Biocon have demonstrated admirable patience and a cautious, yet forward-thinking approach to a new business opportunity. Simmon's recent appointment as head of emerging markets, even as he retains his current position at EPBU, puts him in charge of one of Pfizer's major growth initiatives. How's that for validation of a strategy?

Abbott Charges Into India

Rumors have been circulating for weeks that Piramal, one of India's leading biopharma players, was up for sale. And just as staunchly, management tried to quell the gossip (as recently as yesterday--if you are keeping track.)

Turns out there was quite a bit of truth to the rumorville. Only the buyer wasn't one of the usual suspects. Both GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis' names have been twinned with Piramal in part because of their aggressive moves into both emerging markets and branded generics.

The ultimate winner of Piramal? Abbott, which has been making its own waves in recent weeks through last week's collaboration with Zydus Cadila and the creation of its established product unit.

Abbott claims the deal gives it the numero uno position (in Hindi, that's नंबर एक or nambara ēka) with 7% market share in the Indian pharmaceutical market, but those bragging rights are costing it a pretty penny. Abbott will pay a total of $3.7 billion dollars for Piramal. Interestingly, not all of it is upfront cash--Piramal gets an upfront payment of $2.12 billion and then $400 million annually for the next four years starting in 2011. (A hedge perhaps to mitigate the snafus Daiichi Sankyo has encountered with Ranbaxy?)

Structured this way, Abbott says the transaction, which is still subject to Piramal shareholder approval, will not impact its ongoing earnings per share guidance in 2010. The diversified health care company plans to fund the deal with cash on the balance sheet.

The strategy behind Abbott's deal is obvious and one familiar to IN VIVO Blog readers. Indeed, it can be summed up in three catch phrases: diversification, branded generics, emerging markets. Abbott's CEO and chairman Miles White decided to elaborate however, stating in the press release announcing the news:

This strategic action will advance Abbott into the leading market position in India, one of the world's most attractive and rapidly growing markets. Our strong position in branded generics and growing presence in emerging markets is part of our ongoing diversified pharmaceutical strategy, complementing our market-leading proprietary pharmaceutical offerings and pipeline in developed markets. (Highlights courtesy of IN VIVO Blog.)

We'll have more on the deal later in "The Pink Sheet" DAILY and PharmAsia News. But for now we'll go out on a limb and say that one of the immediate impacts of the deal has got to be the increased liklihood of getting an authentic curry in Abbott Park, Illinois.

Image courtesy of flickrer christopherhu used with permission through a creative commons license.

DotW: Hard Truths

The feverish networking associated with BIO is but a distant memory this week as biopharma’s deal makers got back to work forging alliances or acquisitions that will provide the necessary substrate for future growth.

That this growth won’t come easily is a given. And the week’s news flow only reinforced the notion, illustrating hard truths about the commercial and regulatory complexities at work in the biopharma industry.

Who among us got bitten by reality? For starters, Takeda’s decision to cut nearly 1600 jobs illustrates the problem many Japanese pharma will be facing as their primary care drugs go generic in the coming years. Investors meanwhile pummelled NicOx, after an FDA advisory committee gave its osteoarthritis medicine naproxinod a thumb’s down. The company is pushing ahead as it awaits an official regulatory decision (the drug’s PDUFA date is July 24). Still it’s hard to believe a partner for the medicine will come anytime soon.

And Merck's quietly announced decision to call off development of MK-2578, its follow-on to Amgen’s erythropoietin stimulating agent Aranesp, showcases how difficult it can be to predict the potential market of a biosimilar. The ESA market has been under considerable pressure for some time as regulators have raised safety concerns about the products, first in the oncology setting, and now more recently in end stage renal disease. (See the May issue of The RPM Report for a Q&A with FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Bob Temple for more on the subject.)

It’s a sure bet use of ESAs will go down, not only because of the emerging cardiovascular risks, but also because of the shift toward capitated care in end-stage renal disease that kicks in early next year. Under the new bundling guidelines, there’s pressure on physicians to use ESAs more judiciously, bolstering patients’ anemia via other mechanisms including intravenous iron use. With the commercial viability of ESAs a question, Merck must have run the numbers and determined the amount it would recoup from an Aranesp follow-on (which is expected to be priced at a slight discount to the innovator ESAs but still expensive) didn’t justify the expensive clinical trials it would have to conduct to demonstrate the medicine’s safety.

That big pharmas are wising up to such commercial hurdles ever earlier is a good thing; better to kill a product before you’ve sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into the expensive Phase III. That’s probably cold comfort to the Merck Bioventures group, which has ambitious launch goals for a spate of follow-on products by 2015.

As you contemplate other hard truths (a widening oil spill, the Greek debt crisis, the odds of Great Britain’s coalition government succeeding, the Cavs loss to that Boston team), take a brief respite into transactions land. (Reality may still bite the hand that feeds, but DotW is on its best behavior--for once.) It’s time for another edition of…

Genentech/Evotec: Evotec signed a broad multi-year discovery deal this week with Genentech to identify novel small molecule therapeutics. Further important details, including the financials as well as the therapeutic focus of the alliance, were lacking. Given Genentech’s focus on oncology, and increasingly Alzheimer’s disease and other CNS diseases, presumably Evotec’s technology will be used to develop small molecules in these arenas. Despite the dearth of specifics, the alliance is worth noting for a couple of reasons. First, Evotec’s business model seems to run counter to the collective belief that a biotech’s value is driven not by its technology but from the products derived from its platform. Indeed, as Evotec’s recent deals suggest—in addition to Genentech its signed discovery alliances with Vifor Pharma, Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Active Biotech, and Biogen Idec—management is clearly betting there is more near-term value to be gained from discovering drugs for other companies than in investing in its own pipeline. Second, how the deal proceeds will provide a window into dealmaking at Genentech, which only recently brought on a new head of business development, James Sabry, and continues to forge alliances independent of its Swiss parent. It’s interesting to note that Roche proper is well known to Evotec. The two companies have been collaborating in CNS since 2006, and Evotec is now conducting Phase II trials of EVT101 for treatment resistant depression, with Roche picking up the development costs.—Ellen Foster Licking

Abbott/Zydus Cadila: Abbott’s deal this week with India’s Zydus Cadila is a gift of DotW’s favoring buzz words, including branded generics, established products (a more diplomatic term for generic products), and emerging markets. The news is proof yet again that many big pharmas are following the lead of Sanofi-Aventis and GlaxoSmithKline, which have been the most aggressive in building a commercial presence in “pharmergent” economies such as Brazil, Russia, India and China via branded generics. As part of the recently announced alliance, Abbott will sell 24 Zydus drugs for pain, cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory ailments and neurological disorders in 15 emerging markets. Many, though not all, of the licensed drugs will be in complementary therapeutic areas to Abbott's existing branded generics portfolio, which came to the diversified health care giant via its Solvay and Knoll acquisitions. Specific financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but should the collaboration be a success, Abbott has the option to license more than 40 additional products. In conjunction with the deal, Abbott also announced the creation of a stand-alone established products division with $5 billion in current pharmaceutical sales. The business unit will be led by Michael Warmuth, the former head of Abbott’s diagnostics division. Two years ago, Pfizer set up a similar stand-alone unit as a strategy to cope with flagging US drug sales, especially come 2011 when its cholesterol-lowering medicine Lipitor goes off patent. And that group was also a force at the dealmaking table this week, strengthening its ongoing collaboration with India-based Strides Arcolab (announced earlier this year) via the signing of two licensing and supply agreements. In part one, Strides has agreed to license and supply 38 generic oncology meds to Pfizer in various markets, including the EU, Canada, and Australia. Part two gives Pfizer access to niche sterile injectables for the US market.—Jessica Merrill and EFL

Pfizer/Ergonex: It’s not all about extending the life cycle of established products at Pfizer these days. This week the biggest big pharma’s specialty care business unit inked a deal with Ergonex Pharma for the biotech’s Phase II product terguride, which is in development as a treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). The agreement gives Pfizer world-wide rights (excluding Japan) to the product; in exchange Pfizer will support the ongoing mid-stage clinical trial, taking full control of the compound at the study’s completion. While Pfizer isn’t sharing specific financial details, it will pay Ergonex undisclosed milestones and sales royalties. Terguride, which has an orphan drug designation in the US and the EU, is an oral antagonist antagonist of the 5-HT2B and 5-HT2A serotonin receptors, shutting down signals triggering fibrosis and the narrowing of pulmonary arterial walls that over time results in PAH. The medicine is already approved in Japan for the treatment of hyperprolactinemia.—EFL

Genzyme/Tianjin International Joint Academy of Biotechnology and Medicine (TJAB): Another week, another biopharma looks to ink a discovery deal in China. This week it’s Genzyme’s turn to trumpet a strategic partnership with TJAB, which has an impressive list of co-founders, including China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, its Ministry of Commerce, its Ministry of Health, and the State Food and Drug Administration (China’s equivalent of the US FDA). The partnership was apparently celebrated with the requisite pomp and circumstance, including an official signing ceremony attended by top Chinese officials and senior R&D types from Genzyme. This isn’t the first time Genzyme has traveled east to ink a collaboration. Back in 2007 the biotech signed a deal with Sunway Biotech to develop and commercialize Genzyme’s most advanced gene therapy candidate, Ad2/HIF-1a, which is being tested as a treatment for various forms of peripheral arterial disease. The big biotech is also in the process of building a $100 million R&D center in Beijing, with construction scheduled for completion in 2011. In a small way, the agreement offers the beleaguered Cambridge-based Genzyme an opportunity to shift the news cycle away from the forthcoming annual shareholder meeting and Termeer’s ability to withstand pressures from activist shareholder Carl Icahn who is pushing for his removal.--EFL