BioCentury
ARTICLE | Strategy

Maximizing leverage from contract sales

May 17, 1999 7:00 AM UTC

By choosing a contract sales organization and constructing an imaginative risk-sharing arrangement, CV Therapeutics Inc. has established a marketing approach for its ranolazine treatment for chronic stable angina that other biotech companies may want to copy. If the numbers work out as planned, this type of marketing arrangement would be far more attractive to most young, single-product biotech companies than either of the conventional alternatives: marketing on their own or finding a pharmaceutical company partner.

Thus the net to CVTX is $15 million. But conventional financing benchmarks are not key to this deal. Indeed, the arrangement actually provides better terms for CVTX (Palo Alto, Calif.) than it would get with the kind of conventional 50-50 partnership that would be expected for a compound in Phase III trials...