After reportedly adding $2 billion to Carl Icahn's treasure chest, Alex Denner is now off on his own, setting up a new hedge fund that presumably will set out to follow the same biotech blueprint that has worked so well in the past.
The game plan: Buy into a company experiencing some major turbulence and then try to seize control of the board to push through a restructuring, if not a sale. Then cash in on the big jump in the share price. And today Bloomberg is helping to burnish Denner's image in the industry with a laudatory profile on the high-profile predator's hands-on experience in drug development.
Denner has plenty of investment successes to boast about. He succeeded at ImClone, where he headed an executive committee that steered the troubled company to a $6.5 billion buyout with Lilly ($LLY). And after joining Icahn's team he did even better with the Biogen Idec ($BIIB) turnaround and Genzyme's $20 billion sale to Sanofi ($SNY).
"Alex actually understands the science--and how to build that into a business," ex-con and ImClone founder Sam Waksal tells Bloomberg. "When a company is broken, he knows what should be done to fix it."
This morning the main question on many investors' minds is likely to be which "broken" biotech Denner will focus on first.
- here's the article from Bloomberg