Our CEO accidentally started a book club. Now we’re all dreaming of mega pharma mergers.
BioSpace CEO Josh Goodwin accidentally started a book club among the editorial team here when he recommended For Blood and Money by Nathan Vardi a few weeks ago. Everyone is reading it or has it in their to-be-read pile. Mine just arrived this morning, conveniently dropping on my door step a mere 12 hours after I had finished a rather unsatisfying book.
For Blood and Money follows the development of a BTK inhibitor developed by Pharmacyclics from its discovery all the way to approval. I haven’t read it yet so that’s about the extent of my knowledge at the moment, gleaned from the back cover and the first few pages. But the delightful facts dropped as our Managing Editor Jef Akst reads along have been enough to move it up to highest priority in my ever-shuffling stack of books.
Did you know, for instance, that Pfizer once tried to buy AstraZeneca for $118 billion? Could you imagine those two companies merging? One, an oncology powerhouse with deep European roots. The other, one of the world’s saviors from the global COVID-19 crisis, which has stuttered in recent years once the pandemic wave reached the shore. For the record, S&P Capital IQ values the deal at around $127 billion.
This industry would have been a much different place with those two behemoths as one. Indeed, the pandemic may have been too, with AstraZeneca’s vaccine capabilities combined with Pfizer’s. Who knows what could have been.
Speculations aside, this fact sent us down the rabbit hole wondering how we would cover such a crazy deal and searching for the biggest pharma deals ever. The biggest I have covered as a journalist was Bristol Myers Squibb’s purchase of Celgene for $74 billion in 2019, followed months later by AbbVie buying Allergan for $63 billion.
Those two deals made me think that size was commonplace. It isn’t. Prior to those two, the biggest was Takeda and Shire, a January 2019 takeover that was valued at $62.2 billion but which actually amounts to $80 billion if you include Shire’s debt that Takeda took on.
Since those heady years when pharma seemed to have an appetite for massive acquisitions, the biggest deal has been Pfizer’s $43 billion takeover of Seagen in 2023.
Speaking of Pfizer, did you know the pharma giant also tried to buy Allergan? The company appears over and over when you look at historical deal attempts, suggesting it was the hottest thing in pharma from around 2014 until AbbVie finally sealed the deal. In 2015, Pfizer made a play for the aesthetics drug maker, bidding $363.63 per share. That put the total enterprise value of the potential transaction at a whopping $160 billion, blowing any record then or now out of the water. But Pfizer decided to terminate the deal because of changes announced by the U.S. Department of Treasury that qualified as an adverse tax law change for the companies. AbbVie ended up buying Allergan for the much cheaper price of about $123.23 per share.
In essence, the Pfizer-Allergan deal was scuttled by policy changes. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Many industry watchers began to think that 2025 could be the year megadeals return. But early indications from the Trump administration suggest the much-talked-about antitrust relief that many expected may not arrive. The new Federal Trade Commission Chairman told staff last week that guidelines put in place by former President Joe Biden on mergers would remain for now.
Of course, we can only imagine what is going on in industry board rooms. Maybe our BioSpace book club will spawn the ultimate nerdy pursuit: biopharma merger fan fiction.
If anyone catches Albert Bourla and Pascal Soriot strolling around Cambridge—the U.K. one or the Massachusetts one—do let us know. For now, here’s a recap of the biggest deals in pharma that never came to be, leaving us forever wondering, what if?
