
AstraZeneca to close Charnwood and Lund sites
Well, unless you’ve been half asleep this week, you’ll almost certainly have heard that AstraZeneca (AZ) has firmed up some of the details of the major restructuring and job cuts it announced at the end of January. The official word from the company is that it will be closing several sites and concentrating its R&D efforts on a narrower profile of disease areas.
The company’s R&D sites at Charnwood near Loughborough, UK, and Lund, Sweden, will be closed, with some employees moving to Alderley Park and Macclesfield in Cheshire, UK, and Mölndal, Sweden. The Avlon site near Bristol, UK, will cease pharmaceutical development and become purely a manufacturing facility. In the US, the site in Wilmington, Delaware, will end its early-stage discovery research, with some staff transferring to Boston, Massachussetts.
As the company said in January, not all of these jobs will be lost – about half of the 3,500 ‘affected’ R&D positions will be transferred elsewhere within the company.
A couple of AZ’s subsidiaries are also facing the axe – KuDOS in Cambridge, UK, is to close and the company are looking to sell Arrow Therapeutics in London.
In terms of research areas, the company has said that it is dropping research into thrombosis; acid reflux; ovarian and bladder cancers; systemic scleroderma; schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety; hepatitis C and vaccines other than respiratory syncytial virus and influenza. Some of these might come as a surprise to some readers, as AZ’s track record in a few of these diseases is pretty good – its thrombosis therapy Brilinta (ticagrelor) is currently heading through the FDA approval process after a solid Phase III performance and is predicted to become a blockbuster.
In response to the announcement, Lord Drayson, the UK’s science andinnovation minister said ‘I’m obviously disappointed that AstraZeneca is closing Charnwood, but the announcement that Alderley Park will become one of AZ’s top three global R&D sites shows that the UK remains an attractive location for investment in pharmaceuticals.’
Meanwhile, it’s one of the calendar highlights for analytical and instrument companies this week, with the annual Pittsburgh conference – affectionately known as Pittcon – running in Florida, US. Our very own commercial chemist, Matt Wilkinson, has been there all week and you can see the full lowdown in his blog posts.
PHARMACEUTICALS
Dimebon bombs out
Hopes for a new Alzheimer’s disease therapy have been dashed by news that Pfizer and Medivation’s Dimebon (latrepirdine) performed no better than placebo in its latest Phase III clinical trial. The drug had shown promise in Phase II trials last year and was causing something of a stir due to its interesting proposed mode of action (as reported in Chemistry World).
Merck snaps up Millipore
After speculation over a possible bid by Thermo Fisher Scientific for Billerica, US-based life sciences support company Millipore, German group Merck KGaA has swooped in to buy out the remainder of Millipore’s shares for $107 a pop. This values the deal at $7.2 billion (£4.8 billion) including assumed debt.
While at first sight it might look a little strange for a chemicals company to acquire Millipore, Merck’s chairman Karl-Ludwig Kley calls the move ‘an excellent strategic fit’ adding that it will allow the company to offer an integrated laboratory supplies service and ‘unlock value in our chemicals business’.
Astellas and OSI slug it out
There’s a brawl brewing in the boardrooms of Japanese drugmaker Astellas and US-based OSI Pharmaceuticals. Astellas is on a mergers and acquisitions drive - after licensing Basilea’s antifungal isavuconazole last week, it set its sights on OSI this week, but the US firm is putting up a fight.
On Monday, Astellas announced an all-cash offer of $52 per share, which was promptly rebuffed by the OSI board, who said that Astellas’s $3.5 billion offer ‘very significantly undervalues the company’, despite it representing a 40 per cent premium over the previous day’s closing stock price. Astellas hit back with a lawsuit against OSI to prevent the US firm from implementing its ‘poison pill’ shareholder rights plan to block a hostile bid, saying that the board was ‘not acting in the shareholders’ best interests’. In the meantime OSI’s share price rose above $56, the board said it is ‘reviewing the offer’ and has advised shareholders to sit tight.
Bausch + Lomb spots an opportunity
Eyecare specialist Bausch + Lomb has
licensed French firm NicOx’s glaucoma drug – currently dubbed NCX116. The drug is a nitric oxide-donating prostaglandin analogue, formerly in development with Pfizer as a successor to Xalatan (latanoprost). NicOx has already seen reasonable success with its strategy of bolting NO-donor groups onto existing drugs to complement their existing activity – its nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory naproxcinod is currently in the filing process with the FDA (as reported in Chemistry World).
INDUSTRY
Explosion and TiCl4 leak at Cristal
An explosion at Cristal Global’s titanium dioxide plant in Stallingborough near Grimbsby, UK, has caused liquid titanium tetrachloride and a cloud of accompanying fumes to leak from the plant. According to Cristal’s official release, seen by the Commercial Chemist, three employees were hospitalised – one has already been discharged but one is receiving specialist treatment.
TiCl4 is produced as part of the chloride process for extracting TiO2 from minerals using chlorine gas – liquid TiCl4 can be distilled and then burned in pure oxygen to give high purity TiO2.
The emergency services contained the liquid spillage and shipping in the river Humber was halted for several hours to allow the gas to dissipate.
Terra turf war opens a new front
CF Industries has issued a new bid for rival fertiliser producer Terra industries, challenging a bid made by Norwegian firm Yara two weeks ago. CF had originally made an all-stock offer that valued Terra at $2.1 billion in January 2009, in an attempt to avoid being bought out itself by US fertiliser firm Agrium. However, Terra refused the offer and CF withdrew in January 2010.
‘We withdrew our prior offer because we believed that Terra was unwilling to agree to a sale,’ said Stephen Wilson, CF’s chief executive. ‘Now that Terra is for sale, we have made an offer that is superior to Yara’s substantially lower, highly conditional offer.’
The new offer is for $4.05 billion in cash – which CF already has in place – topped up with CF stocks. However, it does rely on Terra pulling out of its deal with Yara, which will cost them $123 million in break-up fees. Terra has acknowledged the offer but is yet to make any kind of decision
Linde brings helium to Oz
Linde Gases – part of German conglomerate Linde Group - has opened the first helium production facility in the southern hemisphere. The plant in Darwin, Australia, will produce 150 million cubic feet of the gas each year to supply markets in Australia, New Zealand and the growing demand from Asia. The extra production capacity should also bring extra stability to a traditionally quite volatile market, which has seen several drastic shortages in recent years, as reported in Chemistry World.
Steve Penn, global head of merchant and packaged gases at Linde, said ‘With global demand for helium expected to increase, the plant is undoubtedly good news not only for the Asia Pacific region but for the entire world.’
Phillip Broadwith