Astellas acquiring cancer biotech firm Agensys

Kiron Kasbekar
27 November 2007

Japan''s second largest drug maker Astellas will pay $537 million for US biotech firm Agensys to accelerate its antibody research, especially against cancer.

Japan''s second largest drug maker Astellas has agreed to acquire US biotech firm Agensys as part of its plan to accelerate its antibody research, especially in the field of cancer. The price: $537 million, including an upfront payment of $387 million and a later payment of up to $150 million conditional on various development targets.
Astellas, itself the result of a 2005 merger between two Japanese companies, Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical and Fujisawa Pharmaceutical, will acquire Agensys through its US subsidiary. The purpose of the acquisition is to catapult itself to the forefront of the world''s antibody drug research business. The Astellas-Agensys combine is considered to have at least seven potential cancer treatments in the pipeline.

In Japan, the country''s number one drug producer Takeda Pharmaceutical and fourth-ranked Eisai have already been acquiring biotechnology assets. The attraction of the protein-based biotech products is their rapid growth, which is reported to be as much as 14 times that of traditional chemical compounds.

As the biotech action hotted up, Astellas was not sitting on its hands either. In March 2007 it bought a non-exclusive licence to VelocImmune technology from Regeneron and access to a phage display library from MorphoSys.

Astellas expects (on the basis of IMS Health data) that cancer drug sales will double between 2005 and 2015 to over $32 billion. It believes that a bulk of this growth will come from antibodies and molecular targeted drugs, and counts on these two segments to account for close to $9 billion of that growth.

Astellas president and CEO Masafumi Nogimori says, "Agensys will be the cornerstone of our biologics efforts and an integral component of building our oncology efforts within our franchise."