Bio-Finance Vision... Baxalta, Pall and more in glorious technicolour
Baxalta, the biopharmaceutical spin-out of Baxter, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on July 1st and is set to focus on hematology, immunology and oncology. According to management, Over 20 new products are planned to be launched by 2020.
Ludwig Hantson, who had been serving as the President of Baxter BioScience, takes the reign at Baxalta and said the firm “launches with a rich heritage in pioneering innovations and strategic partnerships,” positioning it well to continue to develop transformative therapies.
Like Abbot and Abbvie's split in January 2013, the companies are still closely connected, with spokesperson Deborah Spak telling us a variety of transition service agreements between Baxter and Baxalta have already been signed.
Danaher & Pall
In May, we broke the news that Danaher was set to buy the filtration, separation and purification firm Pall Corporation for almost $14bn.
Two months on and one financial analyst has noted he is slightly baffled as to the lack of movement in price of Danaher’s share price in the wake of the Pall deal.
“The Pall transaction was viewed as quite expensive and possibly signals thesis creep / lack of discipline by management,” Ross Muken from Evercore ISI Group said.
Despite this, he views the asset as “highly strategic” and should bring attractive returns to Danaher, thanks in part to Pall’s biologics filtration business which Muken states is “one of the only remaining 'crown jewel' assets” in the bioprocessing tools sector.
IPOs
Massachusetts and Israel-based company Chiasma is looking to raise up to $78m through its initial public offering in order to support the commercial launch of its octreotide capsules, an investigational oral form of the peptide octreotide, a somatostatin analog that is currently available only by injection.
The firm’s Transient Permeability Enhancer technology helps facilitate gastrointestinal absorption of unmodified drug into the bloodstream and is also being used to investigate the oral delivery of other proteins and peptides.
And finally, oncology firm ProNAi Therapeutics is also looking to go public, launching its IPO to support its Phase II candidate PNT2258, which uses its proprietary DNA-interference technology to interfere with the transcription of specific target genes, therefore reducing the downstream production of the corresponding proteins responsible for cancer and other diseases.
