Onyx / Proteolix:
Onyx's share price was taking a beating in part due to rumblings that the CEO Tony Coles would pull a Goddard. Perhaps the small rally in ONXX shares today, which is often unusual for the acquiring company, reflects a bit of relief by investors that Coles didn't, in the end, pull an outright Goddard.
Two things are somewhat surprising / concerning to me about this deal:
1) Why buy the company outright rather than set up a development collaboration? The purchase pretty much reads like a collaboration, and the other assets are quite immature and unlikely to be deal drivers.
2) This is a follow-up compound on bortezomib / Velcade, which was the much maligned Millennium's drug for multiple myeloma. Millennium was routinely the butt of jokes (deserved, to some extent) for their history of blowing money during the biotech craze. In my view, however, many people underestimate the acumen with which their clinical staff guided Velcade through the approval process and the label expansion process. It appears as if Onyx is counting on a similar treatment of carfilzomib by the FDA. There are pitfalls to this expectation, in part because Millennium did a very good job in shepherding Velcade to market, and because the "unmet need" status for multiple myeloma patients was much more acute then than it is now.
But at least it's no EYET... yet :-)
* For those examining the loose relationship between performance of wall street executives and compensation, they should dedicate a chapter to Goddard. How he kept his job is difficult for anyone but his mother to explain.
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