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Alkermes Steps Toward the Market

Alkermes' $100mm investment in Reliant Pharmaceuticals represents yet one more twist in the drug delivery company's evolution toward a product business. In effect, the deal allows Alkermes to buy into Reliant at a venture valuation and then increase the in-licensing company's value by putting Alkermes products into its marketing program.

Alkermes Inc. 's $100 million acquisition of 19.9% of Reliant Pharmaceuticals Inc. 's shares [See Deal] represents yet one more twist in the drug delivery company's evolution towards a product business. For most of its life, Alkermes has focused on proving its technologies, signing up drug-company partners, expanding its delivery menu (acquiring a number of businesses to do so) and, to the extent it's been able to, working on some products for its own account, taking generics and altering their formulation and release profiles to make them into more usable, more valuable drugs (it's developing, for example, a sustained-release implantable form of the anti-addiction medicine naltrexone, theoretically eliminating the compliance problem among addicts).

What Alkermes doesn't yet have, however, is any way to market such products. The old drug-delivery philosophy was to simply...

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