The big news of the morning, other than Abbott’s Q1 profit report (<—snooozze), is that Sanofi is “buying” BiPar Sciences for $500M. We profiled BiPar back in January and weren’t very easy on them. The company has been around for almost five years and has swallowed globs of cash for various trials, specifically for its PARP inhibitor BSI-201, but yet has never generated any solid clinical results.

As we also reported, a glioblastoma trial was completed last year, but no results were ever released. Currently, the company has a few trials ongoing: ovarian, uterine and triple negative breast cancer – the latter of which sparked Sanofi’s interest.

BiPar was running low on cash and no one was interested in getting a deal done with them back in 08, so the company’s big investors came in early this year and gave them some survival funds ($20M to be exact) so they (the investors) wouldn’t look like failures with yet another start-up.

Today, we have both Sanofi and BiPar saying the former is “buying” the latter for $500M. WTF??!! What’s the $500M for? What have they accomplished? In fact, no specifics are given about the “purchase” and probably because it’s not really a purchase. It’s most likely a license or a structured acquisition where Sanofi pays a few mil to “see” what comes out. The press release also says that the transaction is expected to be cleared in 2Q, but that the “purchase price will depend on the achievement of milestone payments related to the development.”

We don’t see any near-term milestones coming up for BiPar and we think that the “$500M” is an over-exaggeration, or at least a misrepresentation and lack of transparency for a company with an unproven drug.

Conclusion: Someone at BiPar (or their backers) is either cush-cush with someone at Sanofi and/or BiPar lucked out that Sanofi took this off their hands. Without knowing what Sanofi is actually paying to see BSI-201 results, we have to stick to our guns and say they’re desperate. Until we see solid data, we say to Sanofi: WTF? To BiPar: Ehhh, “congrats.”

Image from techvision

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