Avigen shareholder pushes MediciNova merger

Avigen's largest shareholder is trying to engineer a merger of the developer with MediciNova. A subsidiary of Biotechnology Value Fund of San Francisco is offering $20.9 million for Avigen, but says that the offer is contingent on replacing Avigen's current board with a new slate from BVF. And the shareholder wants to deactivate a poison pill that Avigen put in place last November.

The Biotechnology Value Fund said that MediciNova sent a buyout offer to Avigen last month but the offer had been rejected. A spokesperson for Avigen, however, told the San Francisco Business Times that it had not rejected the bid but had offered to include the bid among the company's various options.

Avigen axed 70 percent of its staff after the failure of a clinical trial for the MS drug AV-650. Last month Baxter Healthcare paid $7 million for its early-stage blood coagulation compound AV-513.

- check out the report from the San Francisco Business Times  

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