BioCentury
ARTICLE | Strategy

Novartis loads up

September 5, 2005 7:00 AM UTC

Chiron Corp. has done some things very well over the past decade, growing revenues from its vaccines business and nucleic acid testing business, as well as building a dominant IP estate in hepatitis C. But its therapeutics pipeline has languished, with no new product approval from its internal R&D since IL-2 was first approved in 1992, and only two new compounds in clinical development. And it has run into a buzz saw of vaccine manufacturing problems.

As a result, the stock has lost 20% of its value, from a high of $45.30 in mid-September 2004, before the vaccine production problems came to light, to $36.44 last Wednesday, which gave CHIR a market cap of $6.8 billion...