Cephalon drop on $225M Gemin X purchase as markets look for quicker pipeline hits
This article was originally published in Scrip
Executive Summary
Cephalon has agreed to buy privately held Gemin X Pharmaceuticals, for $225 million cash, providing it access to Gemin X's pipeline of targeted oncology drugs. But Cephalon’s share price dropped 2% on the news. With patent expiry for Cephalon’s wakefulness aid, Provigil, just a year away, investors judged that Gemin X’s lead candidate, obatoclax, which has just come out of Phase IIb testing in small-cell lung cancer, does not fill the hole in Cephalon’s pipeline. Furthermore, small-cell lung cancer, is seen as a high-risk, high-reward clinical area, littered with development failures.