Maryland-based biotech Emergent BioSolutions is acquiring French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi's smallpox vaccine business in an all-cash deal worth up to $125 million.
The company will pay $97.5 million up front to Sanofi and an additional $27.5 in near-term regulatory and manufacturing milestone payments in the deal. Emergent — — which has a manufacturing facility in East Baltimore — will add the only smallpox vaccine licensed by the Food and Drug Administration to its existing portfolio of medical countermeasures to bioterrorism threats.
(((Dan Abdun-Nabi is CEO of Gaithersburg-based Emergent BioSolutions. ))))
Emergent CEO Dan Abdun-Nabi said he expects the business line to make a meaningful contribution to the company's revenue growth in 2018 and move the company closer to its goal of $1 billion in total revenue by 2020. He also expects the vaccine will help the company meet its goal of generating more than 10 percent of revenue from international markets.
"This transaction diversifies our portfolio and broadens our countermeasure franchise with a vaccine that is being stockpiled both in the U.S. and internationally," Abdun-Nabi said in a statement.
Smallpox is highly contagious with a mortality rate as high as 30 percent and is classified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a Category A bioterrorism agent. As part of the deal, the company will assume responsibility for an existing CDC contract worth up to $160 million in providing vaccine doses to the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile. More than 230 million doses have already been supplied to the stockpile.
The line of business will complement Emergent's products, company officials said, including its smallpox product called VIGIV, the only FDA-licensed therapeutic for certain complications from smallpox vaccination.
Emergent has a number of different bioterrorism-related products, most notably to protect against anthrax. In March, Emergent won a $100 million federal contract over two years through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to add more of its anthrax vaccine, called BioThrax, to the national stockpile.
In December, the company received a CDC contract worth up to $911 million for 29.4 million doses of BioThrax through 2021 and a $1.6 billion BARDA contract for its next generation anthrax vaccine last September.
The Sanofi deal is expected to close by the end of the year and product deliveries are expected in 2018 after Emergent receives FDA licensure of a U.S.-based manufacturing facility. Cowen is acting as the financial advisor to Emergent in the transaction.
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