Private equity firms bid for Elan’s drug business
US heavyweights Bain Capital and TPG are two of the buyout shops that put in first-round bids by last Friday’s deadline, according to reports. Warburg Pincus may also be interested. The business on sale could bring in as much as €900 million.
Elan has hired Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers to run the auction process.
And the European Medicines Agency said yesterday it was assessing two cases of a potentially deadly brain disease reported last month in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients being treated with the drug Tysabri.
The London-based agency said it would then decide whether any changes were necessary to the currently approved label for product, which is made by Elan Corp and Biogen Idec.
Shares in both companies slumped following the July 31 news of the latest cases of the brain infection known as progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML).
Tysabri was withdrawn from the market in 2005 after three patients developed the PML infection.
It returned in 2006 but the latest cases may prompt physicians to reduce the number of patients they start on the drug, analysts fear.
More than 31,800 patients were being treated with Tysabri as of the end of June and second-quarter sales totalled €134m.
