Biotech Values

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Drug Found to Prolong Lives of Melanoma Patients Is Approved


From NY Times:

Dr. Allison and colleagues, working at the University of California, Berkeley in the mid-1990s, discovered the role of CTLA-4 and found that blocking it helped mice fight tumors.

Drug companies were not that interested. “The idea was so new, it was hard to get somebody to take it,” Dr. Allison recalled in an interview this week.

The university finally signed a deal in 1998 with NeXstar Pharmaceuticals, a small company in Colorado, which in turn sublicensed rights to Medarex, another biotechnology company.

Medarex developed a monoclonal antibody, a type of protein, to block CTLA-4 and began testing it in partnership with Bristol-Myers. Bristol-Myers then acquired Medarex for $2.4 billion in 2009.

NeXstar, meanwhile, was acquired in 1999 by Gilead Sciences, which gave up its rights to royalties on Yervoy for a payment of $8.5 million from Medarex.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/26drug.html?_r=1&hp