ImClone and Bristol: The Acquisition Fight Focuses on the Erbitux Successor

ImClone chairman Carl Icahn wants Bristol-Myers Squibb to pay a lot more in order to acquire the developer of blockbuster cancer drug Erbitux. His argument: there's a lot more to ImClone than Erbitux, namely, a competitive follow-on. Bristol thinks it's already got the rights to that compound; Icahn apparently disagrees (and indeed Amgen wriggled out of a similar dispute over a follow-on with J&J). But a close reading of the Bristol/ImClone contract tends to agree with Bristol.

Pity Carl Icahn. The biotech industry’s best-known activist shareholder and chairman of ImClone Systems Inc. saw the value of his holdings plummet following the Food & Drug Administration’s 2001 rejection of its lead cancer drug, the EGFR inhibitor cetuximab (Erbitux), and the succeeding insider-trading scandal that sent CEO Sam Waksal to jail. He then saw his shares climb, once Erbitux reached the market, to historic highs, past $85 a share–before plummeting again in the summer of 2004 when sales numbers fell below expectations.

And the stock never really recovered. Although Erbitux did well enough commercially, ImClone investors could see no other real exit...

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