NEWS OF THE WEEK BUSINESS
ACQUISITION COSTS Promising products boost prices being paid for small drug development firms BIG PRICE TAG Medlmmune thinks Aviron's inhaled flu vaccine FluMist, plus promise of other vaccines, is worth as much as $1.5 billion.
T
HREE GROWING U.S. B I O -
pharmaceutical companies—Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Medlmmune, and Cephalon—are willing to pay steep purchase prices to capture small drug developers and their products. Millennium will acquire Cor Therapeutics for $2.0 billion in stock. The new company will have three products, including Cor's heart drug Integrum. Sales of Cor's lead product are expected to reach $225 million this year and to grow more than 30% per year. Millennium has made four acquisitions of smaller drug discovery firms over the past four
years with, it says, a "successful track record of integration. "The company's roughly $250 million in annual revenues comes almost entirely from collaborations with major drug producers. In another deal, Medlmmune has agreed to a stock swap through which it will acquire vaccine developer Aviron. Based on share prices when it was announced on Dec. 3, the deal valued Aviron at $1.5 billion. Medlmmune's goal is to land Aviron's nasal-spray influenza vaccine, FluMist. Pending FDA approval, Medlmmune hopes to launch the product, which will be comarketed with a division of
E N V I R O N M E N T
PESTICIDE RISK ASSESSMENT Study evaluates cumulative exposures and risks from organophosphates
E
EXPOSURE Crop dusters are sometimes used to spray organophosphates on cotton and corn.
12
C&EN
/
DECEMBER
PA HAS RELEASED ITS PRE-
liminary assessment of the cumulative risks posed by 31 organophosphate pesticides. The study evaluates as a group those pesticides that act by a common mechanism in humans and animals—inhibition of the enzyme acetyl cholinesterase. It repre-
1 0,
2001
sents a new way of analyzing food, drinking water, and residential exposures to multiple pesticides using methods devised over the past five years. "Developing and applying the scientific methodologies to perform a cumulative pesticide risk assessment represents a major step forward in EPA's ability to evaluate the safety of pesticides," says Stephen L.Johnson, EPA assistant administrator for prevention, pesticides, and toxic substances. The assessment gives some clues about potential regulatory changes but does not name specific chemicals. "Because this is the first time EPA has applied
American Home Products, in 2002. Annual FluMist sales are estimated to reach $500 million within three years of launch and $1 billion within five years. Medlmmune already hasfiveproducts on the market and anticipated sales of $400 million in 2001. In yet another deal, Cephalon will pay $450 million in cash for French drugmaker Group Lafon. T h e two are already partners for Cephalon's leading product, the narcolepsy drug Provigil. Cephalon will get worldwide rights, along with manufacturing and R&D operations in France. It also will gain another dozen or so Lafon products with combined sales of about $80 million, raising its estimated 2 0 0 2 sales to about $400 million. Cephalon anticipates closing its acquisition by the end of the year, while Millennium and Medlmmune foresee first-quarter 2002 completion dates.—ANN THAYER
these new methods together, we are not yet ready to draw firm conclusions" about risks or consider risk management possibilities, Johnson says. The assessment shows that organophosphates in drinking water do not contribute substantially to exposure, an agency spokesman says. The analysis does indicate that 3% of children one to two years old are overexposed to organophosphates just from food, says Charles Benbrook, a consultant in Sandpoint, Idaho. The American Crop Protection Association, the pesticide industry trade association, says it has not evaluated the 800-page document and is not ready to comment. Adam Goldberg, a policy analyst at Consumers Union, is concerned that EPA hasn't named the pesticides that present the most risk. "There are only a few pesticide-food combinations that drive the risk," he explains, "and EPA should be taking action on those."—BETTE HILEMAN HTTP://PUBS.ACS.ORG/CEN
