Hello Antibody, Patents - depending upon what stage of...

Hello Antibody,
Patents - depending upon what stage of prosecution they are in - are of course in the public domain anyway. Celgene would not need to cough up a dime if they just wanted to take a look at the patents.
My expectation is that they are more interested in looking at trial design, raw data (i.e. not just collated reports, but individual patient records), underpinning pre-clinical work, and similar. So yes, a look under the hood, but I believe that a more accurate analogy is that they wish to dismantle the fuel injectors to see what makes them tick!
I don't believe that they are doing this in order simply to validate or benchmark their own technology, as I think someone has posted. In my experience, that's not how big companies work. I would expect that this is a genuine attempt to assess the tech with a view to in-licensing down the track. This is something that smaller biotechs are doing all the time, and the fact that MSB has managed to extract some cash from Celgene in order to do it, suggests to me that there may have been other companies poking around as well. Celgene have paid for a limited time privilege.