Deals
Roche Bids $4.8 Billion for Spark and Its Gene Therapy
- Swiss drugmaker offers 122% premium in chasing promising area
- Deal shows increasing pharma focus on rare-disease therapies
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Roche Holding AG’s $4.8 billion bid for Spark Therapeutics Inc. raises the stakes further in the bidding for makers of therapies that promise to treat rare, debilitating diseases by correcting inborn flaws in DNA.
Purchasing Philadelphia-based Spark will put Roche near the front of the pack with Swiss neighbor Novartis AG in developing the promising new area of medicine and highlights growing enthusiasm for a field that’s become the focus of a flurry of deals.