Discovery and Preclinical Milestones in Biotech Deals
Executive Summary
We profile early stage milestone payments made over the past year.
Continuing our look at milestone payments made in biotech deals over the past year, the table below breaks out discovery and preclinical stage payments over the past year. (See "Clinical Development Milestones in 2001", IN VIVO, March 2002 [A#2002800054.) As we noted in this space while covering 1999's early-stage milestones (see "Discovery and Preclinical Milestone Payments", IN VIVO, March 2000 [A#2000800039), payments at this stage tend to fall into the $500,000 to $2 million range, though last year saw some higher-than-normal exceptions at the lead candidate selection stage—Eli Lilly & Co. paid Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. $5 million on the selection of an oral hepatitis C candidate [See Deal], and TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc. paid Ligand Pharmaceuticals Inc. $3.5 million when it chose a urology compound, LGD2226, for development [See Deal]. Another notable, though much earlier stage milestone: Wyeth paid Genome Therapeutics Corp. $5 million on GTC's discovery of a novel gene mutation that leads to increased bone mass, which also led to an extension of the deal [See Deal].