Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

If they didn't think they would win that lawsuit, I don't believe they would have picked Copaxone as a drug to partner.

I disagree. The Copaxone patents in the Orange Book expire in May 2014, so generic Copaxone in the US figures to be a lucrative and longstanding product for NVS/MNTA even if they can’t manage to knock out Teva’s patents.

Copaxone is an ideal drug for MNTA to genericize for the US market because:

• It has large sales.

• It’s a synthetic drug that’s priced like a biologic, which means the profit margin is sky-high.

• The structure is complex, and no one but MNTA has the technology to characterize and reverse-engineer it to the FDA’s standards.