Top 20 can­cer drug deals: As­traZeneca just changed the glob­al land­scape for deal­mak­ing in on­col­o­gy

As­traZeneca CEO Pas­cal So­ri­ot has been one of the most cau­tious Big Phar­ma CEOs in the busi­ness — un­til Thurs­day. He had to be. Af­ter be­ing hand­ed com­mand of a leaky ship sail­ing shark in­fest­ed wa­ters, So­ri­ot’s As­traZeneca be­came known for (a) dogged per­sis­tence in pur­su­ing its big new can­cer drug fran­chis­es (b) a bad pen­chant for key tri­al fail­ures and (c) care­ful­ly aligned as­set sales to keep the num­bers in tune for Wall Street.

In many ways, the com­pa­ny’s em­bar­rass­ing odyssey try­ing to com­plete a new world head­quar­ters in Cam­bridge UK sum­ma­rized things com­plete­ly: Off bud­get, way be­hind sched­ule and ex­treme­ly am­bi­tious. It would be beau­ti­ful, if there weren’t so many prob­lems.

Then, in one swoop, So­ri­ot changed tack com­plete­ly. In place of cau­tion and en­durance, So­ri­ot went big, hand­ing his new can­cer drug R&D chief José Basel­ga a ma­jor role for a Phase III can­cer drug with sig­nif­i­cant near-term reg­u­la­to­ry cat­a­lysts. And while you may not have heard a lot about this drug, As­traZeneca clear­ly be­lieves it has one of the next big things in the on­col­o­gy drug field.

We asked Chris Doko­ma­ji­lar at Deal­For­ma to run the num­bers for us, and he came up with the top 10 deals that As­traZeneca has done and how this new pact with Dai­ichi Sankyo lines up among the top 20 can­cer drug deals of the past decade.

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