Bristol Myers to buy Mirati for $4.8 billion

New York: Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. agreed to buy drugmaker Mirati Therapeutics Inc. for $4.8 billion to expand its aging portfolio of cancer drugs. Mirati shareholders will receive $58 a share in cash, the companies said on Sunday. Stockholders will also be eligible for a further payment of $12 a share, potentially worth another $1 billion, should an experimental cancer drug meet certain milestones.

The purchase will give a boost to Bristol as patent expirations weigh on sales of its oncology medicines. The company had to slash its revenue outlook this year after sales of blood cancer drug Revlimid, its third-largest revenue driver, withered in the face of generic rivals. Its top-selling blood thinner Eliquis and cancer immunotherapy blockbuster Opdivo are also scheduled to face competition from generics later this decade.

Chris Boerner, who takes over as Bristol's CEO from Giovanni Caforio later this year, said "Mirati is another important step forward" in the drugmaker's effort to broaden its range of oncology treatments and build out its pipeline for the second half of this decade.


The company has turned to a raft of new products to make up the current and looming sales deficits, such as psoriasis treatment Sotyktu, but they will need time to generate demand. Meantime, Eliquis is one of the first 10 drugs to be subject to Medicare drug-price negotiations under the landmark Inflation Reduction Act. Mirati is in the process of rolling out its first product to patients, a lung-cancer drug called Krazati, and the announcement ended speculation about who would purchase the San Diego-based firm. Shares of Mirati surged 45% on Thursday following Bloomberg's report on the deliberations with Sanofi.

The stock declined 2.6% to $58.65 before the market open in New York on Monday.

A sale will give Mirati further resources to commercialize the lung-cancer treatment Krazati a second-line therapy for a type of lung cancer in which the KRAS gene has mutated and to fund more studies.