Amgen to Acquire Irish Drugmaker Horizon Therapeutics for $27.8B in All-Cash Deal
Pillartree Limited, Amgen’s newly formed private firm, is coughing up nearly $28 billion to make a bigger footprint into rare disease treatments with the acquisition of Dublin-based drugmaker Horizon Therapeutics.
Amgen will pay $116.50 in cash for each share of Horizon, which makes a treatment for thyroid eye disease that generated more than $1bn in its first full year on the market.
The acquisition values Horizon around $27.8bn on a fully diluted basis with an enterprise value of about $28.3bn, making it biopharma’s largest deal of the year.
The deal represents a premium of 47.9% to Horizon’s closing price of $78.76 before it made the late-November announcement.
The buyout will give Amgen another chance to build its portfolio of rare-disease treatments after it closed a roughly $3.7 billion acquisition of ChemoCentryx in October, which focuses on autoimmune disease drugs.
US-traded shares of Horizon had already jumped nearly 30% since it confirmed late last month that it had begun “highly preliminary discussions” about an acquisition with Amgen, the French drugmaker Sanofi, and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen division.
