Highlights of deal-making activity in 2014 include divestitures and asset swaps among large pharmaceutical companies, and a slew of cancer-immunotherapy alliances. The year was also notable for the deals that didn't take place, owing to the US Treasury's changes to tax rules to discourage inversion transactions — most notably, a failed bid by Pfizer to buy AstraZeneca that would have been worth over US$100 billion and AbbVie's abandoned ~$54-billion bid for Shire. Nevertheless, the total dollar value for mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in 2014 reached $226 billion, nearly four times the $62 billion total in 2013.

Among the 2014 M&As that were worth more than $5 billion (Table 1), there was a notable lack of biotech takeovers. Instead, these larger deals featured pharmaceutical companies swapping assets, including GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis, who traded their oncology and vaccines businesses, and Merck & Co., which divested its consumer operations to Bayer. The lone biotech acquisitions among these deals brought key marketed products to their acquirers. For Roche, the $8.3 billion it paid for InterMune brings in a potential blockbuster in the idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis market: the newly approved pirfenidone (Esbriet), which has sales of $1.6 billion forecasted by 2018. Meanwhile, by acquiring Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Merck gained the antibiotic daptomycin (Cubicin), which represented more than 90% of Cubist's 2013 global revenues. Generic versions of daptomycin, however, could be launched as early as next year, as Hospira won a lawsuit against Cubist that invalidated several Cubicin patents. Cubist did score an approval for another antibiotic, ceftolozane–tazobactam (Zerbaxa), for Gram-negative infections about a week after the Merck deal was announced though; analysts estimate the combination drug could reach $500 million to $1 billion in annual sales.

Table 1 Top mergers and acquisitions with value over US$5 billion in 2014
Full size table

Enjoying our latest content?
Log in or create an account to continue

  • Access the most recent journalism from Nature's award-winning team
  • Explore the latest features & opinion covering groundbreaking research
Access through your institution

or

Sign in or create an account
Continue with Google
Continue with ORCiD