The Johnson & Johnson logo stands outside an office building in Singapore on Jan. 17, 2018.THOMAS WHITE/Reuters
Johnson & Johnson agreed to buy Momenta Pharmaceuticals Inc. for about US$6.5-billion on Wednesday, to bolster its portfolio of drugs for hard-to-treat autoimmune diseases.
The acquisition, latest in a recent spate of health care deals, comes just days after France’s Sanofi SA struck a US$3.7-billion deal to buy Principia Biopharma Inc. for its pipeline of autoimmune disease treatments.
Treatments targeting autoimmune conditions have fetched billions of dollars in sales, including AbbVie Inc.’s Humira, which is the world’s bestselling drug.
J&J’s Janssen unit will gain access to Momenta’s experimental therapy, nipocalimab, which is in late-stage testing for warm antibody hemolytic anemia, a condition that causes destruction of healthy red blood cells, and mid-stage testing for myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease.
Nipocalimab is expected to eventually win approval to treat several conditions, “many as first-in-class indications with potential for significant peak year sales, some of which could exceed $1 billion,” J&J said in a statement.
“We find the deal modestly surprising as we see every one of Momenta’s assets as somewhat tricky to develop,” BTIG analyst Thomas Shrader said.
Shares of Cambridge, Mass.-based Momenta were up 69.2 per cent at US$52.15, just a hair’s breadth away from the offer price of US$52.50.
With the recent flurry of activity, the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors have seen 829 deals so far this year, compared with 839 by this time in 2019, according to data from Refinitiv.
The value of the deals, however, is much lower this year – US$62-billion versus US$290-billion a year ago.
J&J in recent years has sold some businesses such as the one that made medical devices for diabetes care, as it sharpens focus on better-performing products such as cancer treatments.
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