THE SPARK: Amag said it has decided to focus on improving sales of its drug Feraheme. The company said in November it had hired Jefferies & Co. to evaluate options for the company, including a possible sale.

On Wednesday, Amag said it named William Heiden as its new president and CEO and would shift its “focus from an active sale process” to business development and he growth of Feraheme. The company said Frank Thomas, who became interim CEO in November after Brian Pereira resigned, will go back to being chief operating officer.

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A year after scoring a $20 million milestone from Bayer, OncoMed Pharmaceuticals is preparing to see if it can generate enough excitement from investors for its cancer stem cell work to support a $115 million IPO.

Jefferies, Leerink Swann, Piper Jaffray and BMO Capital Markets are listed as underwriters.

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Under the agreement, Bristol-Myers Squibb will fund research efforts at Tsinghua University’s School of Life Sciences to identify and validate novel targets in oncology and immunoscience.

The collaboration will also focus on structural biology research, the science of mapping the 3D protein structure of biological molecular targets that could serve as the basis for future drug discovery projects.

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Furiex will retain full development and commercialization rights in the United States, Japan and Canada.

Currently, Priligy is marketed for on-demand treatment of premature ejaculation in 15 countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America, while it is approved for that indication in 43 countries worldwide.

Furiex will be eligible to receive a $15 million payment upon closing, up to $20 million in regulatory and launch milestones and up to $40 million in sales-based milestones, plus tiered royalties on product sales ranging from mid-teens to mid-twenties in percentage terms.

Menarini will assume responsibility for commercialization activities in the licensed territories and will fund ongoing clinical trials.

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While other industry CEOs may be holding out for signs of greater global  prosperity, tech companies can’t afford to wait. Broadly speaking, the  technology industry, perhaps more than any other, is in the vortex of profound  change where companies must innovate and grow or face obsolescence. One of the  key tools to survive in such a dynamic climate is to buy — that is, M&A.

Unfortunately, M&A in tech has often gone awry, more so arguably than in  other industries. In January, McKinsey & Co. published an M&A  study looking at the past decade of dealmaking among top global companies. It  found that among eight major industries, tech companies did the worst job by far  of delivering shareholder returns (excess total returns to shareholders, or  TRS), especially in big transactions. No single measure tells the whole story,  of course. M&A metrics are notoriously tricky because M&A itself makes  up only part of a company’s overall performance and few companies break out  results from deals. Still, shareholder returns do provide circumstantial  evidence as to how well acquisitive companies perform over time and, by  extension, how much value investors are getting from dealmaking.

For tech companies, those returns look discouraging. McKinsey’s corporate  finance practice team found that of eight major global industries, high-tech  companies underperformed their indices by a dismal 6.7% from December 1999  through December 2010. Consumer discretionary was a distant second,  underperforming by 2.8%. Moreover, high tech underperformed in other growth  strategies as well — “programmatic” (serial purchases), “selective” (occasional  purchases that make a cumulative difference to market cap) and “organic” –  except for tactical deals, where it outperformed by 1.2%. Tactical deals are  done occasionally, tend to be small and don’t make a significant difference to  market cap.

Executing M&A is difficult in every industry, including those in which  the underlying technology is stable. But trying to do larger-scale M&A in  tech is like shooting arrows in a hurricane. The pace of technological change,  the sheer number of global competitors and the complexity of products and  markets create tremendous uncertainties. Traditional technology incumbents, in  particular, are finding it tougher to pursue strategies mapped out a decade or  more ago. They’re running as fast as they can over a shifting landscape as  consumers toss away landlines and PCs for newer, portable technologies –  smartphones, tablets — and look to the cloud to connect all their gadgetry.

As fast-developing technologies become essential for dreaming up new products  and winning new customers, companies are caught up in patent wars. Last year  Google Inc. bought more than 1,000 patents from IBM Corp. for an  undisclosed price to protect itself from legal assault. Nonetheless, Oracle is  currently suing Google for $1 billion over claims it violated its Java-related  intellectual property in developing Android, Google’s popular operating system  for smartphones.

The pressure to grow affects every tech company. For that, M&A remains  the favored growth lever. Take Round Rock, Texas-based Dell, a traditional  hardware manufacturer and marketer, and a classic example of a tech company  under intense pressure to change as the market rapidly evolves. “Dell now wants  to be the owner of intellectual property, not just a reseller. On the PC side,  for more than a decade they’ve been reselling other people’s IP,” says Morningstar Inc. analyst Michael Holt. “But in terms of who holds the  value in the PC chain, it’s the Intels, Microsofts, the memory manufacturers.  Dell does a really good job putting it all together, but they don’t own all that  intellectual property, so they’re taking a markup on competing on operational  efficiencies.”

In response, Dell has been revving up its deal machinery, which was largely  dormant before hiring IBM dealmaker David Johnson in 2009. This year alone, Dell  has made five small to midsized acquisitions — its M&A haul for all of  2011. Most of these transactions have been in higher-margin networking, storage  and services businesses. Dell, like other tech companies, doesn’t break out  results for acquisitions. But Johnson is upbeat about the growth of storage  company Compellent Technologies Inc., which Dell acquired for $820 million in  2010. Dell, he says, has expanded Compellent’s physical presence from 1-1/2  buildings to three in less than a year. “We’re taking midsize companies and  leveraging Dell’s distribution and scale, and it seems to be working,” he says.

While Johnson has won plaudits for his M&A acumen and integration skills,  some analysts think it’s too early to say whether a strategy of serial small  deals will give Dell the scale it needs to compensate for a slowing PC business  and new competitors.

“The landscape of players in the marketplace continues to change dramatically  as companies become very big and realize that to achieve growth objectives, they  need to make much bolder moves to move the needle more than before,” says Marco  Sguazzin, principal for mergers, acquisitions and divestitures at Deloitte  Consulting LLP in San Francisco. “The competitive lines between these  companies have been redrawn. Where there were once strong partners, they are now  often competitors in the same space. You now have [new] competitive  battlefronts.”

A good example: the 10-year partnership between Dell and storage giant EMC  Corp. Late last year, Dell said that  it was ending its agreement to resell  EMC storage products two years early — turning the two companies into  competitors as Dell builds out its presence with deals like Compellent.

At the other end of the spectrum are companies such as Apple Inc.,  which is reshaping competition not so much because it’s good at M&A — it’s  not particularly acquisitive — but because it has created scalable products  snapped up by consumers. In fact, Apple has been developing strategies so  transformative that it really belongs in a class by itself — for now, anyway.

Read the full article at The Deal

Directors of Exton, Pennsylvania-based Kensey Nash have a duty to get the best price for the shares and haven’t complied with that responsibility, investor Hilary Coyne said in court papers made public today in Delaware Chancery Court in Wilmington.

“The buyout is a product of a flawed process that is designed to ensure the sale of Kensey Nash to DSM on terms preferential to DSM, but detrimental” to shareholders, lawyers for Coyne said in court papers.

DSM, based in Heerlen, Netherlands, agreed to buy Kensey Nash May 3 to expand in the market for medical-devices made of proteins and synthetic polymers. The buyout price of $38.50 a share was a 33 percent premium at the time.

In the lawsuit, Coyne asks a judge to halt the proposed sale and to certify the case as a class-action, or group, lawsuit to represent all shareholders.

Read the full story at Bloomberg

High praise, but indeed Burrill, head of Burrill & Company, has arguably been the leading guru and visionary within biotech in the past few decades. Not surprisingly, Burrill’s talk—delivered at an iBIO event at the University of Illinois at Chicago—was befitting of that label. His pronouncements and predictions were bold and sweeping. As usual, he was a font of juicy quotes (see list below).

All of the world’s biggest problems—from climate change to energy sufficiency to food security—have biotech as their solution, Burrill began. “One thousand years from now, we’ll look back and see this as mankind’s greatest moment . . . Shame on us if we don’t take advantage of this opportunity.”

“The good news is, the ball’s in our hands,” he said. “The bad news is, we don’t want to fumble it.”

Burrill believes that today’s health care system is essentially the same as 2,000 years ago. It is “episodic” in that we wait for disease to occur and then wait for doctors (today’s “tribal healers”) to tell us what to do. Too often the advice is wrong and the care doesn’t work.

Read the full article at pharmaQbD

Fresenius successfully placed 13.8 million new ordinary shares today. Based on the issue price of €73.50 per share, gross proceeds to the company amount to €1,014.3 million.

The new shares have full dividend entitlement for the fiscal year 2012.

They are not entitled to the proposed dividend for the fiscal year 2011, to be paid on May 14, 2012.

The capital increase is the first component of the financing for the planned acquisition of RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG. On April 26, 2012, Fresenius had announced its intention to make a voluntary public takeover offer of €22.50 per share in cash. The Company also stated it intends to finance the acquisition through a syndicated loan, a bond issue and equity instruments.

Given the capital increase, the total number of outstanding ordinary shares of Fresenius SE & Co. KGaA will increase from currently 163,366,002 to 177,166,002.

Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan and Société Générale acted as Joint Global Coordinators and Joint Bookrunners for the offering. Unicredit, Commerzbank and DZ Bank were Co-Bookrunners.

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The gross proceeds to PROLOR from this offering are expected to be $32.5 million, before deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and other estimated offering expenses payable by PROLOR.

PROLOR has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an aggregate of 975,000 shares of common stock to cover over-allotments, if any.

The offering is expected to close on May 16, 2012, subject to customary closing conditions.

Jefferies & Company, Inc. is acting as the sole book-running manager and Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. Inc., a subsidiary of Ladenburg Thalmann Financial Services and Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. are acting as co-managers for the offering.

PROLOR intends to use the net proceeds from this offering for general corporate purposes, which may include research and development expenses, including expenses related to clinical trials, capital expenditures, working capital, and general and administrative expenses.

PROLOR may also use a portion of the net proceeds to acquire or invest in complementary businesses, products and technologies.

The offering is being made pursuant to an effective shelf registration statement previously filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, which the SEC declared effective on April 26, 2012.

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The number represents an average of predictions that varied from $13 to $18 by 13 analysts who follow at least one of the drugmakers. They were polled shortly after British-based Glaxo said it would take its $2.6 billion offer directly to shareholders after it was rejected by Human Genome’s board.

U.S.-based Human Genome disclosed Glaxo’s approach on April 19, saying it was launching an auction to solicit buyer interest. Its shares are trading above the offer at around $14.50, but are still worth only about half of a peak above $28 hit last May.

“The likely outcome is still a friendly solution at around $15 a share or so,” predicted Cowen and Co analyst Eric Schmidt.

“They must know that in order to get this done fairly expeditiously and on good terms they’re going to have to sweeten it up a little bit. The news today is more posturing than anything else,” he said of Glaxo’s decision to go hostile.

Complicating a hostile bid and any overtures by another potential buyer is a long-standing partnership between the two companies. Glaxo owns 50 percent of Human Genome’s lone marketed product — the lupus drug Benlysta — and has rights to the biotech’s most advanced drugs in development.

Read the full story at Reuters