Danish drugmaker Lundbeck will buy La Jolla, CA-based Longboard Pharmaceuticals for $2.6 billion in cash, the companies said Monday morning, marking the largest biopharma M&A deal since July.
Neuroscience-focused Lundbeck will get access to a 5-HT2C superagonist that just entered Phase 3 last month for Dravet syndrome, a severe type of epilepsy found in infancy. The experimental medicine, known as bexicaserin, could also apply to other developmental and epileptic encephalopathies like Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and CDKL5 deficiency disorder, the company has said.
Lundbeck projects a launch of bexicaserin in the last quarter of 2028 and global peak sales potential of up to $2 billion. The drugmaker also gets an S1P receptor modulator dubbed LP659 that is in Phase 1 and could be tested in multiple neurological diseases.
Charl van ZylLundbeck CEO Charl van Zyl said Longboard will “become a cornerstone in Lundbeck’s neuro-rare franchise.”
“Bexicaserin addresses a critical unmet need for patients suffering from rare and severe epilepsies, for which there are very few good treatment options available,” van Zyl said in a statement.
Longboard spun out of Arena Pharmaceuticals with $56 million in October 2020. It went public five months later. Pfizer then bought Arena for $6.7 billion in December 2021.
The deal comes amid a relatively dull past few months for public biopharma M&A, with many of the recent deals falling below $1.3 billion. There has been no deal of $5 billion or higher yet in 2024.
Lundbeck itself has been relatively quiet on the acquisition front since its $1.95 billion Alder BioPharmaceuticals deal in September 2019. That led to a migraine drug approval a few months later for Vyepti.
The Longboard deal is slated to close this quarter, and both boards have approved it, the companies said. Longboard will be bought for $60 per share $LBPH. Its share price skyrocketed 50% to $58 in premarket trading.