Elixir Hoping to Cash In On Sirtuins Too After GSK / Sirtris Deal

This post was commissioned on April 28, 2008, and it was categorized as M&A, Sales/Marketing.

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For the first time in almost 10 months, and not surprisingly, coming on the heels of the GSK / Sirtris buyout that occurred last week, Elixir Pharmaceuticals has announced that they have been granted a patent for a class of SIRT2 regulators. I came down as pretty negative on the Sirtris deal in this post last week and nothing I’ve read by people presumably smarter than me has changed my mind. I still think it’s a terrible move by GSK but it certainly does teach us a lesson about marketing, sales and the media.

Neither company has illustrated proof of concept with sirtuin regulators in a trial with FDA approved endpoints or even in preclinical models. In that respect, the companies are much more similar that they are different however, in this case, the science wasn’t the deciding factor. So why, you ask, did Sirtris get a buyout at an 84% premium and Elixir have to sign a license agreement with Siena Biotech S.p.A to develop the compounds? Marketing.

I imagine that while Elixir was “wasting time” validating the science behind sirtuins and their compounds, Sirtris was having IPOs, running clinical trials with non-approvable FDA endpoints using a drug (resveratrol), that would never in a million years make it to the clinic and finally, frequently publishing press releases (averaging 5-10 a month in ‘08).

Clearly, Sirtris and the marketing machine won this battle. It is a lesson I won’t soon forget in my nascent pharmaceutical business development career.

(Photo by Dhammza from Flickr under a Creative Commons license)

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This post was constructed by

Eben Tessari

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Eben is a highly caffeinated business development associate at a small, cash sensitive pharmaceutical company somewhere in Massachusetts. He enjoys cliche-less banter, compartmentalization, non-equilibrium thermodynamics and NPV analysis. Agree or disagree with what he's posted? He encourages comments.

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