Gardant Pharmaceuticals, Inc has signed an agreement to be acquired by Switch Pharma Ltd.
Pursuant to the agreement, the Switch Pharma Ltd. shares issued in the transaction must be trading for at least $1.38 per share when the shares of Switch Pharma Ltd. commence trading publicly in London. Shareholders of Gardant will receive one share of Switch Pharma for every Gardant share owned. The transaction is expected to close on September 30th subject to requisite approvals.
Switch Pharma is a company that is focused on the development and commercialization of proprietary, innovative and differentiated therapeutic drug products. The company's core strategy is to focus on the uses of different applications for known drugs. The company's management believes that this method allows Switch Pharma to be selective about the drugs it develops and gives the company the advantage of already knowing the safety and toxicology profiles of known drugs before identifying new indications, thereby saving considerable expense and time.
The existing therapeutic drugs have typically been marketed for a number of years, have established safety profiles and can be developed for new clinical indications. Utilizing this development focus, the company seeks to reduce the risk, time and cost of new product development as compared to the development of new chemical entities. Gardant pharmaceuticals was attractive to Switch Pharma because of its risk balanced portfolio and the fact that the majority of the portfolio now consists of oncology-focused compounds, as oncology applications and therapeutics are the intended focus of Switch Pharma going forward, of the eight re-purposed therapeutic products that Switch currently is seeking to develop, two are for the oncology marketplace.