Anato­my of a long-de­layed biotech buy­out: With its stock price beat­en down, aban­doned by po­ten­tial bid­ders, Tesaro wound up in GSK’s ea­ger arms

When the board at Tesaro $TSRO first cheered on a move to sell the com­pa­ny on Feb­ru­ary 23rd, 2017, spurred by a nod from an in­ter­est­ed phar­ma play­er as their PARP drug Ze­ju­la closed in a near-cer­tain FDA ap­proval, the siz­zling-hot stock was sell­ing at more than $186 a share.

None of the com­pa­nies they con­tact­ed to try and spark an auc­tion, though, were in­ter­est­ed enough to make an of­fer. And by the time Tesaro’s board and CEO Lon­nie Moul­der got around to com­plet­ing a buy­out deal 21 months lat­er, they did it with a phar­ma gi­ant that wasn’t even on their orig­i­nal hit list — and came away with well un­der half of the share price they start­ed out with.

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