Blame the ozan­i­mod fi­as­co on the Re­cep­tos team? Just wait a sec, says ex-CEO, who sold the com­pa­ny to Cel­gene for $7.2B

Ear­li­er to­day we picked up some crit­i­cal re­marks that a se­nior Cel­gene ex­ec had to say about the team at Re­cep­tos, the sub­sidiary or­ga­ni­za­tion which hand­ed in an ap­pli­ca­tion for the would-be block­buster ozan­i­mod on­ly to have FDA reg­u­la­tors kick it right back with an em­bar­rass­ing refuse-to-file no­tice. And it didn’t play well with the CEO who sold the com­pa­ny to Cel­gene for $7.2 bil­lion.

“I think that 99% of folk at Cel­gene wouldn’t have sub­mit­ted, but we had Re­cep­tos out on the West Coast and, for what­ev­er rea­son, the de­ci­sion was made to sub­mit,” Cel­gene’s head of hema­tol­ogy and on­col­o­gy Nadim Ahmed told David Crow at the Fi­nan­cial Times. “We learned a les­son of hu­mil­i­ty and that when you do an ac­qui­si­tion it’s bet­ter to be more in­te­grat­ed rather than be com­plete­ly away from the moth­er ship.”

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