- For Print
- April 17, 2007
Eisai Co., Ltd. (Headquarters: Tokyo, President & CEO: Haruo Naito) and Eisai Corporation of North America (Headquarters: New Jersey, U.S., President: Hajime Shimizu) announced on April 16 (U.S. Eastern Time) the completion of Eisai's acquisition of Morphotek® Inc. (Headquarters: Pennsylvania, President & CEO: Dr. Nicholas Nicolaides) after having cleared the approval process by the government authorities including the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The expense for this transaction was US $325 million after excess net cash. Morphotek, based in Exton, Pennsylvania, will continue to be headed by Dr. Nicholas Nicolaides, as President.
Morphotek develops therapeutic monoclonal antibodies through the use of its proprietary human antibody technologies, Human MORPHODOMA® and Libradoma™. The company is leveraging these technologies to enrich its pipeline that currently includes therapeutic antibody leads for the treatment of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and infectious disease. Two of its programs are currently in early stage clinical trials for the treatment of ovarian cancer and pancreatic cancer, respectively, with several others in preclinical development.
Oncology is one of the Eisai's focused areas per defined in the company's 5th mid-term global business plan, the “Dramatic Leap Plan”. Eisai currently has an extensive global oncology research program for discovering small molecule anti-cancer agents. This acquisition enables the expansion of Eisai's capabilities into the biologic therapeutics field, with which Eisai will make further contributions to fulfilling a variety of unmet medical needs of the people with cancer through the development of therapeutic antibodies, small-molecule anti-cancer drugs and potential combinations of both.
In addition, the expansion of Eisai's research & development capability complements the company's establishment of its oncology sales and marketing operations in the U.S. Aided in part through its recent acquisition of four oncology-related products in October 2006, Eisai has developed its commercial oncology infrastructure and is well positioned to market new oncology products that originate from Eisai's research and discovery efforts or through future acquisition, co-promotion or in-licensing opportunities.