Feb 02, 2021
Ben Edwards
In early-December, just weeks before AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine began receiving regulatory approval around the world, the Cambridge-headquartered drugmaker agreed a $39-billion deal to buy US biotech firm Alexion.
The size of the transaction was driven, in part, by Alexion’s pipeline of rare blood disease treatments and its blockbuster drug Soliris. Such medicines are often the driver of bumper mergers and acquisitions in the pharmaceutical industry because of the power of patents, a type of intellectual property (IP) protection that prevents others from copying a product and selling their own version of it for a set number of years, typically two decades.