Roche to buy gene therapy firm Spark for $4.8 billion

Roche is to buy gene therapy firm Spark Therapeutics for $4.8 billion, adding an already-approved treatment for inherited blindness to its portfolio, and boosting its pipeline with a series of potential rare disease drugs. The Swiss pharma has reached a deal to buy Spark in an all-cash transaction at a price of $114.50 per share, a premium of 122% to the US company’s closing price on Friday evening. If approved by US competition regulators the merger is set to go ahead in Q2 and has been unanimously approved by the boards of both Spark and Roche.
It will see the US biotech continue its operations in Philadelphia as an independent organization within Roche’s group of companies. Roche is looking for new revenues as its “big three” blockbuster cancer drugs Avastin, Herceptin, and Rituxan/MabThera lose their patent protection and face competition from cheaper near-copy biosimilars. It already has a hemophilia A injection on the market, Hemlibra, which acts as a proxy for the factor VIII that is missing in patients with the condition. Buying Spark, therefore, makes sense as the biotech is developing two therapies for hemophilia A, for forms of the disease with or without inhibitors to factor VIII replacement therapy.