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Drug giant Pfizer has offered $18.50 a share in an attempt to buy all shares of Trillium Therapeutics, a firm with two trials under way for drugs that spark the immune system to attack blood cancers, including leukemia and multiple myeloma.
Pfizer’s offer places a value on Trillium of about $2.26 billion, a 118-percent premium on the stock price’s 60-day weighted average.
Trillium’s drugs work similarly to Keytruda, a Merck concoction shown to be effective against cancer tumors.
Blood cancers make up about 6 percent of all malignancies, according to the Financial Times, with about a million people worldwide diagnosed with some form of blood cancer in 2020.
Last September, Pfizer’s Breakthrough Growth Initiative, which funds promising research, put $25 million into Trillium and Pfizer’s chief cancer scientist joined Trillium’s scientific advisory board.
Pfizer is channeling some of its billions in profits from its COVID vaccine into cancer drugs.
In 2020, Pfizer’s revenue from oncology drugs reached $10.9 billion, a 20-percent gain over 2019’s, the FT reported, while a quarter of the company’s revenue came from its COVID vaccine.
TRENDPOST: Like every war, the COVID War has produced war profiteers.
We have been documenting the windfall profits Pfizer, Merck, and other vaccine producers have been collecting for almost a year in our stories “Pfizer CEO Makes Windfall Profit from Vaccine News” (17 Nov 2020), “Drug Companies Cashing in on COVID” (11 May 2021), “Vax Mints New Billionaires” (25 May 2021), “Drug Lords Rake in Big Bucks with Bad Shot” (3 Aug 2021), and “More Booster Jabs, More Windfall Profits for Drug Lords” (24 Aug 2021).
In “Drug Lords’ Vax Money Grab Getting Bigger” (17 Aug 2021) we noted that Pfizer reported $10.8 billion in revenues during the first half of this year and, thanks to its coronavirus vaccine, has raised projections and now expects to book $33.5 billion in sales for all of 2021, triple its take in the year’s first half.
BioNtech, Pfizer’s partner in the vaccine, reported $1.3 billion in profits for this year’s first quarter.
The two companies expect to sell three billion doses of their formula this year and four billion in 2022, according to FiercePharma.
Moderna, which makes nothing but its COVID vaccine, sold $5.9 billion worth in the first six months of 2021 but expects annual sales to grow faster and finish this year at around $20 billion.
TREND FORECAST: Pfizer and other pharma firms raking in big vaccine bucks will use chunks of their windfall to buy their way to bigger presences in the drug marketplace, making more Bigs bigger yet.
Intuit, the TurboTax maker, is buying up Mailchimp, a leading pioneer in email marketing for $12 billion. A popular service that offers email service, customer-relationship-management tools and digital-ad purchases is used by many small and midsize businesses. Indeed, we use Mailchimp to notify you of Trends Journal reports and information.
TRENDPOST: As we have reported, with interest rates at record lows and cheap money freely flowing, U.S. Bigs have struck some $2 trillion in buyout deals so far this year… nearly three times higher than in 2020 buyout binge according to Dealogic.
Thus, the data proves it. Monopolies and Oligarchs are the New Age of a declining Land of Opportunity cultures.