The UK company Clinigen has acquired its rival Idis in a £225m deal, which it says will make it the market-leader in the US$5bn global unlicensed pharmaceuticals supply market.
Clinigen, a speciality pharmaceuticals and services company based in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, announced details of the deal on 24 April 2015.
Its chief executive Peter George says the acquisition will also boost the company’s position in the US$2bn clinical trial market.
“I am confident that, together with Idis, we have the right people to define and shape the unlicensed medicine supply market — an increasingly important healthcare sector for patients with unmet needs,” he says. “The enlarged entity creates an incredibly exciting business with tremendous opportunities for growth.”
Idis, which has its European headquarters in Weybridge, Surrey, and North American headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey, was founded in the UK in 1987 by two pharmacists looking for medicines that were not available on the UK market for individual patients. The company supplies unlicensed medicines, predominately through managed access schemes.
Clinigen has three business divisions — a global access programme for critical drugs that are unavailable to patients in their home country, supply of pharmaceuticals for clinical trials and a specialty pharmaceuticals division.
According to figures from the IMS Institute for Health Informatics, 154 new drugs were launched globally between 2008 and 2012. Of those, almost half were unavailable in the UK in 2013.
