A large pharmaceutical company is spending more than $11 billion to acquire the maker of two drugs used to treat skin cancer.
New York-based Pfizer said Monday it would acquire Boulder, Colorado-based Array BioPharma for $11.4 billion, or $48 per share.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
Shares of Array were up more than 59 percent premarket on the Nasdaq following the news and opened at $47 per share. Shares of Pfizer were down about 0.1 percent on the New York Stock Exchange.
The company currently markets two products, Braftovi (encorafenib) and Mektovi (binimetinib), given as a combination therapy for BRAF V600E- or BRAF V600K-mutant unresectable or metastatic melanoma. The two drugs are currently being tested in more than 30 clinical trials, such as the Phase III BEACON study in BRAF-mutant metastatic colorectal cancer.
Array said May 21 that the BEACON study, which combines its two drugs with Eli Lilly & Co.’s Erbitux (cetuximab), met its primary endpoints of showing improved overall survival and overall response rates for the triplet combination compared with Erbitux given with chemotherapy combinations. The triplet combination showed an overall response rate of 26.1 percent and a median overall survival of nine months, compared with 1.9 percent and 5.4 months for the comparator.
The overall response rate had fallen somewhat short of some expectations. Ahead of the BEACON data release, analysts at investment bank Cowen wrote May 13 that they and roughly half of investors foresaw the overall response rate reaching 30-40 percent. However, the vast majority of investors were of the view that the response rate would be at least 20 percent, which the analysts wrote would still lead to the use of the triplet combination in the clinic in the minds of prominent colorectal cancer doctors they had interviewed.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
At the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual conference in Chicago, which concluded earlier this month, the company presented data in an oral poster discussion from the Phase III COLUMBUS study of Braftovi and Mektovi in advanced BRAF-mutant melanoma. The data were intended to give a four-year analysis of overall survival data from the trial. Median overall was 48.6 months for the two-drug combination, compared with 33.6 months for the comparator, Roche’s Zelboraf (vemurafenib), a competing BRAF inhibitor.
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