Major pharma-deals: How anti-cancer drugs are reshaping the pharmaceutical industry

Major pharma-deals: How anti-cancer drugs are reshaping the pharmaceutical industry

Reasons for mega-mergers are not always easy to establish from the outside, but that does not keep people from trying to find them anyway. In the recent $100 billion offer of Pfizer  buy the British firm AstraZeneca, nearly every analyst was unanimous about the primary motives: to exploit the patentlinked lower tax rates in the UK and to access AztraZeneca's anti-cancer pipeline.

Pfizer, in spite of spending $6-7 billion a year on research and development, does not have a good anti-cancer pipeline. AstraZeneca does, and Pfizer wants to grab it quickly. But the story does not end there. This was not the first deal in recent times that had a strong link to cancer drugs.

Two weeks ago, Novartis bought GlaxoSmithKline's cancer division for $16 billion, including a strong early-stage pipeline of potential drugs. Pfizer made a second offer to AstraZeneca last weekend. It was rejected, but industry observers think the last word on this issue has not been heard yet.

Pfizer will pursue its takeover goals relentlessly, and so will several other companies in search of new therapies for cancer. So, cancer is set to drive a major consolidation in the industry, as pharma and biotech companies compete to build good anti-cancer pipelines and develop drug superior combinations.

After a long and uncertain period, cancer therapy suddenly seems to be heating up, holding both promise for patients and business for drug companies. "We are at a very interesting point in cancer R&D," says Debasish Roychowdhury, former head of oncology at Sanofi and now a pharma consultant based near Boston in the US.
"We have an interesting confluence of scientific understanding, drug development technology and flexibility from regulators." In an earlier job, Roychowdhury was heading the development of the GSK anti-cancer pipeline that Novartis has now bought.