Amgen agrees to buy Nuevolution for $167 million

California biotech Amgen has agreed to buy Danish biopharmaceutical company Nuevolution AB for 1.61 billion Swedish crowns ($166.8 million).

The Copenhagen-headquartered firm said that its board unanimously recommended that the company accept Amgen’s offer of 32.5 Swedish crowns per share, which represents a premium of 168.8% on Nuevolution’s share price on Tuesday.

The offer is also 69% higher than the highest trading price of Nuevolution’s shares on Nasdaq Stockholm in the year running up to 21 May 2019.

Nuevolution is a small molecule drug discovery biotech focused on inflammation, oncology and immune-oncology. Nuevolution is the inventor of Chemetics, a patent protected DNA-encoded library drug discovery platform, which enables efficient discovery of novel small molecule drug candidates.

Dr Raymond Deshaies, senior vice president of Global Research at Amgen, said: “Our vision for Amgen's research organization is to improve the health of patients and societies around the world by discovering, developing and delivering transformative medicines.”

“To achieve our vision, we will need to embrace compelling opportunities, like this one, which will significantly expand Amgen's ability to discover novel small molecules against difficult-to-drug targets and with greater speed and efficiency. We highly value our collaboration of the past three years with Nuevolution and are excited to incorporate their expertise and DNA-encoded library discovery platform technology more holistically into Amgen's research moving forward.”

Louis Goss