Daily Management Review

Eli Lilly To Acquire Prevail, A Gene Therapy Developer, For About $1 Billion


12/16/2020




Eli Lilly To Acquire Prevail, A Gene Therapy Developer, For About $1 Billion
With the aim of strengthening its presence in the lucrative area of gene therapy treatments that is used for the development of treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, drug making giant Eli Lilly and Co will by acquiring Prevail Therapeutics Inc in a deal that is worth about $1 billion, the former company said.
 
The company has managed to rake in revenues of between about $1 billion to $2 billion from the sale of its treatment for Covid-19 which has prompted the company to issue forecast for 2021 that beat estimates of analysts.
 
In the field of drug research, development of gene therapy has come out to be one of the hottest areas and a number of top pharma companies gave been attracted to this field because such treatments are usually quite expensive.
 
With a price tag of $2.1 million-per-patient, the gene-therapy for a rare muscular disorder is the most expensive one-time treatment called Zolgensma, which has been developed by Novartis.
 
The acquisition will help Lilly to develop a gene therapy program which will have at its core the experimental treatments of Prevail which includes the likes of its experimental lead therapy for patients with Parkinson’s disease.
 
According to the comments made in a note by Mizuho analysts, the acquisition of Prevail fulfils all of the things that Lilly was looking for, and the analysts added that they believe that the deal also carries strategic sense at a reasonable price.
 
According to the deal, shareholders of Prevail will get $22.50 per share, which is a premium of 80 per cent of the stock price of the company as of end of trading in the United States on Monday.
 
A “contingent value right” worth $4 per share in cash is also included in the deal and will be payable when the first regulatory approval of a product from Prevail’s pipeline is received by Lilly.
 
The news of the deal resulted in a 83.2 per cent rise in the stocks of Prevail while there was a 3.8 per cent rise in the stock price of Lilly.
 
The US Food and Drug Administration and the European Commission have granted “fast track” and “orphan drug” tags to a number of the therapies of Prevail. The company said that possible gene therapies for Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, are also included in the company’s preclinical pipeline.
 
According to forecast of Lilly, revenues of between $26.5 billion and $28 billion are expected to be generated by the company for 2021. According to IBES data from Refinitiv, an average estimate of analysts for the company’s sale revenues for 2021 was pegged at $26.47 billion.
 
(Source:www.economictimes.com)