It began almost three decades ago with a container of frozen camel blood in Belgium, took a detour through Morocco and progressed to a stock listing in New York last year. The latest chapter in Ablynx NV’s story: a takeover worth about $4.8 billion.
The biotech company -- which Monday agreed to a bid from France’s Sanofi, snubbing a lower offer from Danish diabetes-drug maker Novo Nordisk A/S -- stemmed from an accidental discovery. A group of students at the Free University of Brussels in the late 1980s needed animal tissue for a project and found a sample of camel blood in the freezer, said Serge Muyldermans, a researcher who helped found Ablynx.
