AstraZeneca ‘overpaid for Cambridge Antibody Technology’

AstraZeneca paid too much for UK pharmaceutical research company Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT), according to one industry analyst.

The UK’s second largest pharmaceutical company announced yesterday that it had bought the Cambridge-based company for 702 million pounds. CAT specialises in monoclonal antibody research – an increasingly important sector of research that can, in theory, produce antibodies targeted specifically at a particular disease.

Navid Mallik, a pharmaceuticals business analyst at Collins Stewart, told the Guardian that someone had been “taken to the cleaners” over the deal.

He said: “AstraZeneca are talking as though they will now be a major player in the biological market, but they have not got a single antibody product in the market and there are plenty of companies ahead of them. There are better ways for them to spend their excess cash.”

AstraZeneca’s finance director defended the deal, telling the paper: “We would love to be able to find a low-risk, cheap deal.”

Yesterday, David Brennan, AstraZeneca’s chief executive, said that the success of the two companies’ previous collaborations was proof that the company had made the right move.

He concluded: “This acquisition represents a major long-term strategic investment by AstraZeneca in novel biological therapeutics. It is our intention to both expand and broaden the scope of our discovery and development pipeline and we expect that, by 2010, up to a quarter of our candidates for full scale development will be biological therapeutic agents.”

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