To be shortlisted is a good thing.
So, too, with Orange County drugmakers.
This year’s edition of the annual list ranks 10 companies by employee count topped by Allergan PLC in Irvine, with more than 1,300 workers and some seven decades of work in the county.
The list is two companies larger than last year’s list of eight, with the addition of Avid Bioservices Inc. in Tustin and Urovant Sciences Ltd. in Irvine.
Allergan’s eyecare and aesthetics medicine units are here; it’s chartered in Dublin for tax purposes, headquartered in New Jersey, and being bought by Chicago-based drugmaker AbbVie Inc. (NYSE: ABBV) for $63 billion, based on the latter’s closing price of $78.45, the day before the deal was announced in late June.
AbbVie traded at $71 last week and a $105 billion market cap; Allergan traded last week at a $54 billion market cap.
Allergan said last week it had sent out proxy statements and the deal is expected to close early next year.
Avid Buyers
Avid (Nasdaq: CDMO) is new to the list because last year it was transitioning to focus on contract drugmaking; it was previously a development-stage drug developer named Peregrine Pharmaceuticals, though its ticker symbol is testimony to work its done for some 15 years: contract development and manufacturing organization.
Avid essentially sheared off its development activities—selling operations and facilities in the last year—to go solo as a pharmaceutical contract manufacturer to other firms.
Its lead drug candidate at the time, bavituximab, fetched $103 million; it later raised another $20 million from a sale of shares. It roughly tripled development capacity a year ago, trade reports said.
Wall Street’s response over the last year has been mixed: Avid’s shares rose almost 60% at its June quarterly report and maintained gains for several months, but fell back about 28% following its most recent numbers, given this month.
Avid traded last week at about $5.80 and a $325 million market cap.
Swiss Made
Urovant (Nasdaq: UROV) is a locally based unit of Roivant Sciences, in London and Basel, Switzerland, that makes drugs for urologic conditions, particularly overactive bladders, under technology licensed from Merck.
Last year, it was largely in stealth mode locally until it went public at $14 and raised $140 million.
Roivant is an umbrella organization founded by ex-hedge fund manager Vivek Ramaswamy; spinoffs are formed to rapidly develop individual “innovative medicines through a novel form of industrial organization.” Roivant calls these units “vants,” a term which in India refers to high-ranking advisers to an 18th-century monarch in Hyderabad.
Roivant’s website lists more than two dozen “vants” developing some 40 drugs; Ramaswamy agreed this month to sell 75% of Roivant to Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma Co. in Tokyo, a deal set to close next month.
Urovant traded last week at about $9.60 and a $292 million market cap.
Public Works
OC is generally better known in medical circles for its big device makers (see list, page 27), including its biggest two by market cap—Edwards Lifesciences Corp. at $45 billion and Masimo Corp. at $8 billion—in Irvine, the legacy firms like Beckman Coulter in Brea, and area outposts of global giants such as Medtronic or Johnson & Johnson.
Israel-based drugmaker Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, with local operations in Irvine, was hammered for much of last year by competition in its bread-and-butter generics manufacturing: its shares are down two-thirds in the last 12 months, to an $8.8 billion market cap.
Allergan sold its generics business to Teva in 2016 for $33 billion in cash plus a 10% stake in Teva, then-worth $5.3 billion, which it began to divest last year.
Snapshot
Other big names “short-listed” for OC drugmaking include Dendreon Pharmaceuticals in Seal Beach, which China-based and privately held Sanpower Group bought for $820 million in mid-2017; and Irvine-based Par Pharmaceuticals, a unit of Dublin-chartered and Chestnut Ridge, N.Y.-based Endo International PLC (Nasdaq: ENDP), which traded last week at an $874 million market cap.
