Amgen to acquire Danish firm Nuevolution for £132m

Based in Copenhagen, Nuevolution shares its advanced discovery platform and programmes with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to develop novel medical treatment options for the patients.

Amgen’s offer represents a premium of 169% compared to the closing price of Nuevolution’s shares on Nasdaq Stockholm on 21 May.

Nuevolution’s internal programmes are said to focus on therapeutically important targets within inflammation, oncology and immuno-oncology.

The company has invented Chemetics, a patent protected DNA-encoded library drug discovery platform that allows discovering novel small molecule drug candidates.

The platform offers access to screen billions of molecules and efficient optimisation of drug properties, as well as helps in efficient optimisation of drug properties in the process of detecting the drug candidate.

According to Amgen, Chemetics was successfully applied in multiple drug discovery and technology licensing partnerships, including difficult-to-drug biological disease targets.

Amgen and Nuevolution have involved in a multi-target collaboration, since October 2016. Two of the cancer programs under this collaboration have advanced rapidly, and Amgen has exercised its contractual opt-in right for these first two programs.

The deal will allow combining Nuevolution’s technology and drug discovery expertise with Amgen’s experience and capabilities in research and development, manufacturing and commercialization, helping Amgen to increase its ability to serve patients across its selected areas.

Amgen global research senior vice president Dr Raymond Deshaies 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.”