BMS/Inhibitex

Less than seven months after Bristol-Myers Squibb announced plans to buy Inhibitex for $2.5 billion the big pharma scrapped development of the lead asset it paid so handsomely for. But sometimes there are winners AND losers: think of this as a savvy sellout. Read More »

Decode/Amgen

A vote for this largely unexpected $415 million cash buyout starts with a binary decision: you either think Amgen is onto something by bringing this gene association-driven discovery engine in-house to bolster its target validation for drug discovery, or you don't. Read More »

AZ/BMS/Amylin

An innovative, two-part, three-party structure; two rather troubled Big Pharma companies aiming to turbocharge their push further into diabetes; and a U.S. biotech facing stiff competition now and in the near future for its lead products set this $7 billion dollar deal apart from the rest. Read More »

Watson/Actavis

This $5.6 billion mega generics deal is the culmination of more than a decade of work that has seen once provincial US generics industry become globally integrated – and Watson's story in particular shows how hard yet crucial that evolution has been. Read More »

Biogen/Stromedix

What makes Biogen's acquisition of Stromedix stand out in the crowd of up-front-plus-earnout private biotech deals is the fact that to land Stromedix's lead asset, Biogen first had to set it free. This $75 million up-front buyout sees Biogen reacquiring an IPF asset it out-licensed to the start-up in 2007. Read More »

Pfizer/Nestle

We're nominating the Pfizer spin-outs in the M&A category because when industry's biggest pharma player gets the deconsolidation religion, we're intrigued to see how far it will go. The nearly $12 billion sale of its nutritionals business to Nestle is a major step. Read More »

AZ/Amgen

2012 featured an uptick in pharma-pharma peer dealmaking, a trend we expect to continue. These are important deals – industry's largest companies' tacit admissions that they can't, and shouldn't, do everything on their own. AZ and Amgen will work together to develop five Amgen clinical antibodies, including the late-stage brodalumab. Read More »

Mannkind/Tolero

When is a licensing deal, well, not exactly a licensing deal? How about a deal in which the out-licensor can opt back in to the program being sold off, with the related "bio-bucks" then flowing in the opposite direction – that is, to the company that in-licensed the assets in the first place? Such is the case in this deal around an asset targeting BTK, exciting oncology target du jour. Read More »

Celgene/Epizyme

The latest iteration of Roche/Genentech style partnership, Epizyme's tie-up with Celgene in April 2012 served notice that for the handful of companies like Epizyme – working in a big, oncogenic target class with a powerful discovery platform, an expansive IP estate, and an A-List of backers that were ready to finance them to the promised land – the transactional climate clearly favors the seller. Read More »

Novartis/University of Pennsylvania

Novartis' five-year alliance with the University of Pennsylvania is the year's flashiest deal in the hot and maturing area of pharma-academic collaboration. But it's nominated also for the potential importance of the technology, which more typically would find a home in a venture-backed biotech environment. Read More »

Roche/Versant/Inception 3

Inception 3 is a biotech deal in the hearing loss space that opens a window into an intriguing new hybrid model of company creation. Instead of drug hunting first and finding a partner or buyer later, Inception found a hunting partner in Roche. In turn they formed Inception 3 based on technology from Stanford University. Versant provided equity funding, and Roche has added funding that gives it an option to acquire Inception 3 upon filing of its first IND. Read More »

Transcelerate

TransCelerate BioPharma, a joint effort to alleviate bottlenecks in the pharmaceutical R&D process unveiled in September, brings together the common interests of 10 otherwise ultra-competitive big pharma companies. And hell if you can get ten pharma companies to agree on the terms of an alliance, even one under the vague umbrella of 'open innovation,' well that deserves a nod from us. Read More »

bluebird bio

In a year when one gene therapy was approved, other companies raised big rounds, and more gene therapy start-ups are known to be raising money, bluebird bio's round was the biggest in the promising sector. Read More »

Ovascience

Investors enthusiastically embraced fertility specialist Ovascience in 2012, with a $37 million Series B in March and a $4 million August private placement. Then they brought its share price up after the company listed on over-the-counter exchanges in November. The Form-10 phenom plans to circumvent FDA to launch its lead product in 2014, only three years after conception. Read More »

Intarcia

If the sheer size of Intarcia Therapeutics' $210 million Series C round of equity and debt funding weren't enough to make it a top candidate, the company's commitment to control of a novel type 2 diabetes treatment surely marks the deal as a late-stage outlier that's worthy of your consideration for the award. Read More »

Foundation Medicine

Foundation Medicine made the Deals of the Year short-list with a $42.5 million Series B round to finance the marketing of its first product, FoundationOne, a test that identifies all classes of genomic alterations in about two hundred cancer-related genes and provides a list of drugs associated with the specific alterations that are FDA approved, in clinical testing or likely to enter the clinic in the next 12 to 24 months. Read More »

Warp Drive Bio

Warp Drive uses new computational technology to find the basis of new drugs in natural products. Lead investor Third Rock recruited two others for this $125 million Series A: Sanofi and Greylock Partners. Sanofi's involvement is where the deal twist comes in: it also has an option to buy Warp Drive. It's a two-way street, in fact: The investors can force a sale to Sanofi if Warp Drive hits certain goals. Read More »

Rusnano/Domain/CoDa

An umbrella deal between Rusnano, a five-year-old $10 billion Russian sovereign fund, and the US venture capital firm Domain Associates, announced in March, and a subsequent tie up with Domain portfolio company CoDa Therapeutics, goes some way toward changing industry notions of innovating in emerging markets. Read More »