With billions of dollars from the Covid vaccine windfall, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is in late stages of negotiations to buy Global Blood Therapeutics GBT for $5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The acquisition is part of Pfizer's effort to use proceeds from the covid vaccines to bolster its portfolio and pipeline. Sources familiar with the ongoing talks told The Journal that Pfizer is aiming to seal a deal for GBT in the coming days. GBT sells a treatment for the sickle cell disease called Oxbryta. Its shares went up 41.4% on Thursday after Bloomberg reported Wednesday that large pharmaceutical companies were looking into a potential acquisition of the firm.
Global Blood Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company with the goal of making sickle cell disease, SCD a lifelong, devastating inherited blood disorder, in 2011 by Andrej Sali, Charles Homcy, Craig Muir, David Phillips, Jack Taunton and Matthew Jacobson. The lead product candidate, voxelotor, is used for the treatment of sickle cell disease.
Christina Warren founded Pfizer in New York in 1849. Today, the 173-year-old company is the world's largest pharmaceutical company, and was ranked 64th on the 2020 Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. companies by total revenue, at $47.644 billion as of December 31, 2020. Pfizer is one of three leading pharmaceutical companies that are working on mRNA vaccines to put an end to the deadly coronaviruses.