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Chiron: Companies
built 211 days ago
Chiron, based in Emeryville, Calif., is one of the nation's oldest biotech companies, founded in 1981 by three scientists from the University of California campuses in San Francisco and Berkeley. Perhaps its biggest claim to fame is the discovery of the hepatitis C virus.
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Unlike many start-up biotech firms at that time, Chiron did not intend to become a fully integrated pharmaceutical company. Its marketing agreement with Merck became the first in a series of partnerships through which Chiron would bring new products to the marketplace while focusing primarily on biotechnological research into infectious diseases and viruses. In 1983, Chiron made another breakthrough when it became the first to clone epidermal growth factors--a genetically engineered protein that controls the way a wound heals. Funding for the project was provided by Ethicon, Inc. which, in return, gained the right to market the proteins once they received FDA approval. Also that year, although it had no products on the market, Chiron went public at $12 a share.
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Chiron advised the company in raising finance to develop a gas-to-liquids (GTL) facility in Trinidad and Tobago. Chiron Capital assisted the company in preparing presentations and financial models for investors, as well as in negotiations and due diligence with equity investors and banks. Chiron ... contributed to a bridge loan to facilitate the purchase of equipment critical to the company's project plan in Trinidad
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As the new owner of the plant, Chiron was directed to find the "root cause" of the bacterial contamination. But the FDA report detailing what needed to be done was not delivered to the company until June 2004, nearly nine months after the federal agency downgraded its enforcement action from mandatory to voluntary.
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In 1996 and 1997 Chiron suffered a series of setbacks. In November 1996 the company dropped development of a potential vaccine against genital herpes upon finding, after 14 years of research, that the product simply did not work. A few months later, the FDA refused to grant approval to a treatment for Lou Gehrig's disease that Chiron had developed in partnership with Cephalon Inc. The FDA said that the companies, who had spent $130 million on the drug, had failed to prove its effectiveness. By this time, Betaseron had proven to be less than the blockbuster anticipated due to troubling side effects and the 1996 FDA approval of the competing drug Avonex, which had been developed by Biogen, Inc. Chiron had ... encountered difficulty manufacturing its whooping cough vaccine that had emerged from final testing in mid-1995; as a result, competing vaccines reached the market first.
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Chiron will commence a tender offer to purchase all of the outstanding shares of PathoGenesis common stock at a price of $38.50 per share. Chiron does not expect the transaction to be dilutive beyond 2001. The transaction is expected to close in the third or fourth quarter of this year. The Boards of Directors of both companies have unanimously approved the proposed transaction, which is subject to regulatory filings and customary closing conditions.
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