With its closely-watched hep C drug telaprevir working its way toward an FDA filing, Vertex Pharmaceuticals announced that it is buying Canada's ViroChem Pharma for $375 million in cash and stock. The deal gives Vertex access to two pipeline drugs that could offer a big assist in creating cocktail therapeutics for hep C patients.
Vertex will pay $100 million in cash and issue $275 million in shares for the acquisition. Vertex has achieved widespread interest in its telaprevir program, which promises to be a blockbuster therapy offering patients a first-line therapy with better efficacy than currently used drugs. But as Xconomy notes, there are a host of other hep C drugs in the pipeline. Many of those drugs will help create new cocktail drugs that can work even better as a combo therapy, much like HIV cocktails do today. And that inspired Vertex to buy the Canadian developer.
"These compounds look as good as anything we've seen, and better than most. And we've looked at everything," CEO Josh Boger told analysts. One of ViroChem's drugs, VCH-222, produced what Vertex called "the most substantial reduction" of the virus for any solo polymerase inhibitor drug being studied.
- here's Vertex's release
- read the report from Xconomy