Progenics Pharmaceuticals Buys Molecular Insight in Stock Swap

Progenics Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PGNX]]) of Tarrytown, NY, said on Tuesday that it has acquired financially troubled Molecular Insight Pharmaceuticals for 4,566,210 shares of its stock.

Molecular Insight, based in Cambridge, MA, was founded in 1997 and filed for Chapter 11 in December 2010. In a Wednesday morning webcast, Progenics CEO Mark Baker said Molecular was acquired for its pipeline of small molecule cancer drugs. Molecular has three drugs in development, two of them in clinical trials.

Progenics, founded in 1988, has gone through its own financial challenges in recent years. In September 2011, the company overhauled its operations to focus on oncology drugs, jettisoning other research projects and cutting 26 percent of its staff in the process. Baker said this morning that since then the company has been looking for “stuck companies,” as he called them—biotechs with promising drugs but no money to develop them.

Progenics said that Molecular Insight has no debt, and it may make additional milestone payments to Molecular’s former owners on future commercial sales.

Progenics’ stock was up 3.89 percent by mid-morning today, to $2.94 a share.

Author: Catherine Arnst

Catherine Arnst is an award- winning writer and editor specializing in science and medicine. Catherine was Senior Writer for medicine at BusinessWeek for 13 years, where she wrote numerous cover stories and wrote extensively for the magazine’s website, including contributing to two blogs. She followed a broad range of issues affecting medicine and health and held primary responsibility for covering the battle in Washington over health care reform. Catherine has also written for the Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report and The Daily Beast, and was Director of Content Development for the health practice at Edelman Public Relations for two years. Prior to joining BusinessWeek she was the London-based European Science Correspondent for Reuters News Service. She won the 2004 Business Journalist of the Year award from London’s World Leadership Forum, and in 2003 was the first recipient of the ACE Reporter Award from the European School of Oncology for her five-year body of work on cancer. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University.