BMS compra AMYLIN . AZ y Lilly entran "de por medio..." / Amor de muchos...

Bristol-Myers S. agreed late on Friday to buy Amylin Pharmaceuticals, the maker of a promising new diabetes drug, in a complicated deal that is valued at about $7 billion.

To help finance the transaction, Bristol-Myers is teaming up with AstraZeneca, which will pay about $3.4 billion in cash and will share in the profits from Amylin’s sales.

It is the latest deal by major drug companies to refill their product pipelines with new treatments, especially as older successful products lose patent exclusivity. (Más)

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As part of the deal, Bristol-Myers will assume debt and will make a payment to buy out Amylin’s former partner, Eli Lilly & Company.

The multistep transaction ends months of speculation about the fate of Amylin, which has garnered interest from a number of companies since putting itself up for sale in April. Besides Bristol-Myers and AstraZeneca, others that had made bids included Novartis, Merck and Sanofi-Aventis, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Drawing these companies’ attention is Bydureon, a treatment for Type 2 diabetes that is injected once a week. It is a refinement of Byetta, which was introduced in 2005 and requires twice-daily injections. Both are derived from a hormone in the saliva of the Gila monster, a poisonous lizard found in the Southwestern United States and in Mexico.

“This is about expanding our diabetes franchise,” Elliott Sigal, Bristol-Myers’s chief scientific officer, said in an interview by phone on Friday. “It’s important to have different medical options.” (Más)

Miguel Tovar, en BLOGACEUTICS, publica Bristol-Myers Squibb compra Amylin