Sciele Pharma Expands Into Pain Market With Victory Pharma Buyout

Sciele Pharma, an Atlanta, GA, pharmaceutical company owned by Japan’s Shionogi & Co., says it is acquiring San Diego-based Victory Pharma for $150 million. Sciele specializes in the sales, marketing and development of branded drugs for cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, women’s health, and pediatrics.

The acquisition adds Victory’s lead product, a once-daily sustained release formulation of the pain reliever naproxen sodium (Naprelan), to a Sciele drug portfolio that includes fexofenadine HCL (Allegra) for hayfever and nisoldipine (Sular) for hypertension.

The deal announced yesterday comes less than three months after Victory raised $45 million in a secondary venture round headed by Essex Woodlands Health Ventures of Palo Alto, CA. Victory, which also was backed byAmpersand Ventures of  Wellesley, MA, acquired its lead drug product in 2006, and has been developing its own drug candidates for managing pain as well as nausea and other side effects of pain drugs.

In a statement, Sciele’s president and chief operating officer, Ed Schutter, says, “The acquisition of Victory is another important step in the implementation of Sciele’s strategic plan to further diversify our product portfolio and generate additional growth for Sciele.” Sciele’s parent company has targeted the pain market as a therapeutic area, and Sciele says Shionogi plans to accelerate “development of its drug candidate for the alleviation of opioid-induced adverse effects” without clarifying if that means taking on Victory’s drug development.

Victory, which generated $57 million in sales last year, has 182 employees, including 120 sales representatives. The transaction is expected to close before June 30.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.