Danish pharma Lundbeck vastly increased its offer to buy Longboard Pharmaceuticals over six months as other parties came to the dealmaking table, a new SEC filing shows.
Lundbeck initially proposed $29 per share
$LBPH
on April 19 to buy the Phase 3 neurology biotech. By Oct. 14, when the $2.6 billion cash deal was announced, it had raised its offer to $60, according to an SEC
filing
on Wednesday morning.
At the time, Lundbeck CEO Charl van Zyl
told
Endpoints
News
the deal was within the “benchmark premium” for companies with assets in Phase 3. “We believe we have fundamentally not overpaid for this asset,” he said in the interview.
Longboard said last month that its 5-HT2C superagonist known as bexicaserin had entered Phase 3 for Dravet syndrome and has broader plans to test the treatment in other epileptic encephalopathies like Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. Lundbeck had been intrigued by the
Phase 1b/2a data
that Longboard shared on Jan. 2 for patients who experience seizures associated with developmental and epileptic encephalopathies. That data skyrocketed Longboard’s stock price from $6.03 on Dec. 29 to $25.10 on Jan. 2.
Shortly after the data release, Lundbeck representatives met with Longboard CEO Kevin Lind at the annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. Lundbeck would go on to increasingly raise its offer from $29.00 to $34.50, then $54.00 and $59.00. Lind wanted $62.00 a share, but they eventually settled on $60.00.
During the process, Longboard had also talked with other undisclosed companies, codenamed Parties A, B, C and D, according to another SEC
filing
on Wednesday. Party A had submitted a few offers, including one as high as $60.00 on Sept. 27. But on Oct. 2, Party A told Longboard it was no longer interested because of “various perceived risks,” according to the SEC document.