Since Lynparza® Is In The News, Today… We Will Rerun Ours, From 2018, On The Whole Long History Here

FiercePharma has a story on Lynparza out this morning. It is overall immaterial to Merck, as the changing landscape described there… doesn’t much move the needle as to Merck everall revenue before 2028 — but it offers a chance to remind, about the longish, and tangled, various corporate histories, here. So… see below:

[Original dateline — 12.03.2018:] If you were smart enough to buy in to Tesaro’s Citi Morgan Stanley-managed IPO six years ago — at $13.50/share (or even in the after-market at around $15), and hold — today, you are pretty happy… as GSK is buying your holdings for $75/share — all cash. That’s a more than five-fold return, in under six years. Sweet.

Since Tesaro in-licensed several of the legacy Merck (and in the case of rolapitant, at least, legacy Schering-Plough) oncology related cast-offs, after the bust-up of Schering-Plough… in truth, we have watched this company’s progress since at least March of 2010, on and off.

[Interestingly, and ironically (since Merck once owned it — via S-P), the rolapitant program came to be a commercial competitor of Merck’s Emend^®, as a nausea treatment in chemo.] In any event, today we learn that, as part of Glaxo’s retooling (shedding consumer health assets; fully redeploying into / entering oncology)… Tesaro will become… GSK. And the nutritional beverages will be off-loaded. Here’s a bit, from one of the many morning stories on it all:

…GlaxoSmithKline is acquiring oncology firm Tesaro in a deal worth $5.1 billion just hours after announcing the sale of its health drinks business in India to Unilever for some $3.7 billion….

“The proposed transaction significantly strengthens GSK’s pharmaceutical business, accelerating the build of GSK’s pipeline and commercial capability in oncology,” GSK said in a statement announcing the Tesaro deal early Monday…. It’s all cash with GSK paying $75 a share….

It is said that dull people make their fortunes… in real estate (cough — Trump!), while the sharp make theirs in the stock market… and the geniuses? Well. They make theirs trading life science companies, in that stock market. Heh. I honestly don’t know anyone who said that, but it sounds good, today. Really stable… geniuses — smile.