fewer proxy battles going forward. He just got a seat on the board of Ariad Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ARIA]]), for instance, without having to resort to a contentious shareholder vote.
7) “We look at all the pieces and then figure out, if this were optimally run, what would it be worth?” When Sarissa looks at a potential biotech investment, it comes up with a value for all of its assets and the probability-adjusted value of its pipeline, and tabulates what the company would be worth if it were running on all cylinders. If there’s a big difference between that and its current market capitalization—either because of bad management, debt issues, unnecessary costs or otherwise—and Sarissa thinks it can fix those problems, it will invest, Denner says. With early biotechs, the problems he often sees are “issues of focus,” where a company might have three programs but only two are really worth investing the cash they’re pouring into them.
8) It’s probably a good thing you didn’t visit NPS Pharma’s old Utah facility. More than two decades ago, NPS Pharma was spun out of the University of Utah, originally, to look at the medicinal benefits of spider venom. This strategy didn’t pan out, and NPS Pharma has gone through a number of changes since to get where it is today—a public company with a $3+ billion market capitalization that is developing drugs for rare diseases like short bowel syndrome. One of the key decisions Francois Nader made when he took over the company in 2008 was to ax all of its discovery capabilities, lay off nearly 400 employees, and move the company’s headquarters from Utah to New Jersey. This apparently had one little-known benefit: it made NPS’ headquarters a much more pleasant place to visit. As Cohen recalls from visiting NPS’ former Utah home many years ago,: “It was like a medieval chamber of horrors. You would walk in and it was one aquarium after another in dimly lit rooms with red and blue lights, and hyper-poisonous snails and spiders.”
9) “No one had a clue this would prove to be a great drug.” Apparently, before George Golumbeski joined Celgene in 2009, he had the inside track to one of the most successful drugs in recent history. Golumbeski recalls working for another pharmaceutical company and visiting Celgene in the late ‘90s to talk about methylphenidate, an ADHD drug. Celgene’s head of business development at that time “begged” Golumbeski and one of his colleagues to think about taking the rights to a drug called thalidomide that the company had in-licensed as a potential treatment for leprosy.
“To be frank, we sort of laughed when we got back in the car,” Golumbeski joked.
As many readers know, that drug became the foundation of Celgene. After flirting with bankruptcy several times, the company later turned thalidomide (Thalomid) and a successor lenalidomide (Revlimid), into hugely successful cancer drugs. And Golumbeski, as it turns out, is now the one in charge of finding new products to fill up Celgene’s pipeline behind thalidomide and its derivatives.
10) “We’re looking at some things that are outside of the box.” With the increasing collaborative ties being formed by research institutions in the city comes the opportunity to get creative with deals. Golumbeski said that Celgene has been looking for ways outside of its various early-stage deals to tap into research, and is thinking about “working more closely” with some of the collaborative consortiums that are emerging from academia so it can “broker some of the inventions” coming out of them.
“I think we’ll see over the next five years some experiments—some will work, and some won’t—of better and different ways of working with academia,” he says. “And I assure you, a fair bit of that is going on in our region and this city.”
