The Life Sciences team advised Royalty Pharma on its agreements to make an equity investment in Epizyme, Inc. (Nasdaq: EPZM) and to purchase royalties on future worldwide sales of tazemetostat, Epizyme’s lead product candidate, from Epizyme and Eisai Co. Ltd.
As part of the agreements, Royalty Pharma made an upfront investment of $100 million in Epizyme and received 6,666,667 shares of Epizyme’s common stock. In connection with this arrangement, Epizyme has the option to sell an additional $50 million of common stock to Royalty Pharma over the next 18 months at then-prevailing prices, and Royalty Pharma has a three-year warrant to purchase an additional 2,500,000 shares of common stock from Epizyme at $20.00 per share. Royalty Pharma will pay Eisai up to $330 million to purchase this royalty stream, depending upon FDA approval for certain indications.
Royalty Pharma is an industry leader in acquiring pharmaceutical royalties, with over $16 billion in royalty assets. Royalty Pharma funds innovation in life sciences both directly and indirectly: directly when it partners with life sciences companies to co-develop and co-fund products in late-stage clinical trials, and indirectly when it acquires existing royalty interests from the original innovators. Epizyme is a late-stage biopharmaceutical company committed to rewriting treatment for cancer and other serious diseases through novel epigenetic medicines. Eisai Co., Ltd. is a leading global research and development-based pharmaceutical company headquartered in Japan.
The Goodwin team included Erin Svokos, Yasin Akbari and Sarah Smith with invaluable assistance from Paul Jin (Antitrust) and Rosanne Yang.
For more details, read the articles in BioSpace, The Pharma Letter and Yahoo Finance.