M&A, page-82

Biogen CEO Chris Viehbacher has presented at the J P Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.

On the subject of business development, Viehbacher says that Biogen is continually looking for deals, specifically in neuroscience, rare disease or immunology, that make strategic or financial sense. Biogen has teams of people at the conference this week. At last year’s conference, those teams looked at 100 companies and ended up doing two deals.

But he stressed that he’s not prepared to overpay. "It is hard to find assets worth paying for ... there is still an expectation of some pretty high premiums in the market," he said.

On his wish list is another acquisition like that of Reata Pharmaceuticals. Yet, he said that promising, late-stage assets like Skyclarys are “really hard to find” and the price at which they sell can be “inhibitory to doing a deal.”

Asked by J P Morgan analyst, Chris Schott, whether he had any bias right now towards either early, mid or late-stage assets, Viehbacher said it was towards early to mid-stage, purely because of cost. Reata was mentioned yet again. “I think the pricing of later-stage assets can be inhibitory to doing a deal. Now that said, if we could find another Reata, that would be a nice thing to do, but those things are really hard to find.”

Further on Reata and Skyclarys, Viehbacher shared the following about the nature of rare disease drug launches, which echoes Acadia’s experience with its rollout of DayBue.

“.. the interesting thing about Friedreich's ataxia is that there is a group of patients out there who have been diagnosed, and you can get at those quite early. We did that in the U.S., first 1,000 patients, fine, seeing the same thing in Europe.

We're expecting to see now SKYCLARYS approved outside of U.S. and Europe sometime this year, particularly in South America. There's a high prevalence there. But the reality is that a lot of physicians, particularly primary care, have never heard of Friedreich's ataxia. And so it can take quite a long time for patients to actually get diagnosed. So one of the things that occurs in most rare diseases is once you offer a therapy, there's a whole lot more interest in diagnosing patients. So that's where we are now in really educating physicians about if you see these symptoms, you should ask, could this be Friedreich's ataxia? If you think that, you may want to consider a genetic test.

So it's hunting patients. That's what rare disease is all about. You start to see a slower growth because they're not there in physician waiting rooms. But we have been able to validate from an analysis of medical records that there are, in fact -- we thought there were about 4,400 patients in the U.S. Actually, we think there's about 4,800. There's more in Europe. And there's actually quite an awful lot in Brazil, in Colombia, in Argentina. And so we see steady growth. It's a little lumpy because it depends on how many patients you found last week, but that's just the nature of rare diseases.”
https://www.biospace.com/business/under-pressure-to-deal-biogen-executives-deflect-urgency-at-jpm25

https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/biogen-viehbacher-dealmaking-jp-morgan/737418/

https://www.reuters.com/business/he...no-burning-need-more-acquisitions-2025-01-14/

https://seekingalpha.com/article/47...-43rd-annual-healthcare-conference-transcript