Cooley’s 2022 Life Sciences M&A Yr in Overview – Cooley M&A

Though 2022 noticed a common decline in M&A exercise within the life sciences {industry} in comparison with 2021’s frenetic tempo (when deal quantity was up 52% from 2020), life sciences deal move in 2022 on stability remained robust regardless of the headwinds. Creativity was the 12 months’s main theme as biotechnology corporations more and more sought different cash-raising alternatives in a difficult capital markets atmosphere, comparable to utilizing carve outs and bolt-on transactions to cash-rich consumers as a lifeline to maintain program runways intact, stock-for-stock mergers with different biotechnology corporations as a solution to mix money balances and fund key packages (together with by way of private-to-private or public-to-private mixtures), and divestitures or out‑licenses of product candidates to streamline operations.

Amid depressed valuations, biotechnology corporations additionally noticed an growing variety of calls for from activist buyers that in sure instances led to extra deal exercise. Nevertheless it wasn’t all carve outs and anxious buyers – even with the headwinds within the {industry} and past, there have been nonetheless a number of conventional public M&A offers involving biotechnology or medical machine corporations, as giant pharmaceutical corporations continued to have money to deploy for acquisitions. For instance, the sale of Horizon Therapeutics to Amgen for approximately $28 billion was the third-largest all-cash transaction within the pharmaceutical sector in historical past.