Merck Completes Tender Offer To Buy Idenix
Merck announced that it has successfully completed its tender offer to buy all outstanding shares of common stock of Idenix Pharmaceuticals for its acquisition. Merck bought the stocks at $24.50 per share.
More than 131 million Idenix shares were tendered from the offer, representing around 82.5 percent of the company’s outstanding common stock. Merck said it intends to complete the acquisition of Idenix through a merger of a wholly-owned subsidiary.
The company originally announced the transaction last month with an eye on Idenix’s investigational drugs for hepatitis C. “Idenix has established a promising portfolio of hepatitis C candidates based on its expertise in nucleoside/nucleotide chemistry and prodrug technologies. Idenix’s investigational hepatitis C candidates complement our promising therapies in development and will help advance our work to develop a highly effective, once-daily, all oral, ribavirin-free, pan-genotypic regimen that has a duration of treatment as short as possible for millions of patients in need around the world,” said Dr. Roger Perlmutter, president of Merck Research Laboratories.
Idenix currently holds three HCV drug leads under clinical development. These are the two nucleotide prodrugs IDX21437 and IDX21459 and the NS5A inhibitor samatasvir. Merck plans to evaluate the drugs to be included in a combination treatment for HCV, which affects approximately 170 million around the world.
In a recent interview with Forbes, Dr. Perlmutter hinted that Merck is cooking up a three-drug, one pill rival to Gilead’s blockbuster HCV drug Sovaldi. Merck already had the two drugs, an NS5a inhibitor and a protease inhibitor, needed for the combination. Its acquisition of Idenix brings the third drug to the mix: a nucleoside analog that comes from the same calls of compounds as Sovaldi. Gilead itself acquired Sovaldi from Pharmasset for $11 billion.
Dr. Perlmutter revealed that Merck is working on making its HCV treatment regimen run a shorter amount of time than its competitors. Sovaldi can achieve a cure in around three months and Gilead’s combination treatment cuts that time in as little as two months. But Merck wants its HCV combo therapy to cure patients in four to six weeks. “We’re looking to bring this to patients around the world to ultimately cure hepatitis C virus infection in everyone,” concluded Dr. Perlmutter.