Roche Holding AG plans to buy Spark Therapeutics Inc for US$4.8 billion, a deal that would give the Swiss drugmaker one of the first-ever therapies to treat, and potentially cure, a disease by providing a fix for a patient’s defective genes.
Roche is to pay US$114.50 a share for Philadelphia-based Spark, a 122 percent premium to the biotechnology company’s close in New York trading on Friday.
While the price is rich, Spark shares were trading above US$90 as recently as last year.
The offer was a 19 percent premium to Spark’s 52-week intraday high, Roche said.
Along with French biopharmaceutical company Ipsen SA’s agreement yesterday to acquire Clementia Pharmaceuticals Inc for as much as US$1.3 billion, the Roche deal shows how drug companies are placing big bets on the fraught but lucrative field of rare diseases.
Gene therapies, in particular, are a promising new area of medicine with the potential to cure a wide range of often-rare diseases by replacing or repairing errors in the body’s instruction manual.
Their amazing potential has been matched by breakthrough prices, as companies have sought to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for them — or more.
The Roche deal’s premium is an outlier, but recent pharmaceutical deals have come with rich valuations.
Acquirers paid an average 45 percent premium in takeovers of listed pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies announced over the past five years, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Spark’s therapy Luxturna treats a gene-driven form of blindness by injecting a working version of a gene called RPE65. In people with that condition, the working genes can help restore sight.
After Luxturna was approved by US regulators in 2017, Spark said it would charge US$425,000 per eye for the treatment.
Spark was founded in 2013 at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Along with Luxturna, it is developing gene therapies for the bleeding disorder hemophilia, an area where Roche is seeking to broaden its presence.
Spark already has a licensing agreement with Roche’s crosstown rival, Basel-based Novartis AG. Under an agreement struck last year, Novartis has the rights to sell Luxturna outside the US.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by