Matt Hurd, Melissa Sawyer and Renata Hesse have been named “Dealmakers of the Year” by The American Lawyer for advising Seagen in its $43 billion acquisition by Pfizer, the largest-ever all cash acquisition in the biopharmaceutical industry. Completing the complex deal required coordinating a global regulatory process, including securing approval from the FTC and the European Commission. The deal allowed Pfizer to acquire Seagen’s antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) technology capabilities and will enable the combined company to accelerate the next generation of cancer treatment breakthroughs.
S&C’s Healthcare & Life Sciences Group has a history of working with “innovative and successful companies,” said Matt, the Co-Head of S&C’s Healthcare & Life Sciences Group, “and this [merger] was a good example of that.”
The successful completion of the merger is even more impressive considering “it was a year when M&A was down, the markets were very challenging,” said Melissa, the Global Head of the Firm’s Mergers & Acquisitions Group. “There was talk at that time of regional banks collapsing across the country…. It wasn’t just a dynamic regulatory environment, but a dynamic macro environment.”
Renata, Co-Head of S&C’s Antitrust Group, led the regulatory approval processes, which “went quite smoothly,” she told The American Lawyer. “We worked very hard to comply with the [FTC’s] second request [for documentation] quickly, with the goal being to do that as expeditiously as we could, without the commission feeling like they weren’t being given enough time to do their review.”
This deal reflects S&C’s dominance in the healthcare sector. In the past 30 years, S&C’s Healthcare & Life Sciences Group has advised on more than $1.7 trillion of transactions in this sector, including Amgen’s recent $28.7 billion acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics.
S&C lawyers have been named “Dealmakers of the Year” by The American Lawyer 28 times in the past 26 years, the most of any law firm.
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