"Padlock goes from startup to scooped up in a flash" by Robert Weisman Globe Staff March 23, 2016
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. will pay as much as $600 million for Padlock Therapeutics Inc., a Cambridge biotech company that was founded less than two years ago.
Padlock’s rapid move from startup to sale is remarkable even in an era when big pharmaceutical companies are desperate for new drugs and technology to treat diseases. It also underscores the lucrative payouts available to biotechs and their venture capital backers if their work catches the eye of Big Pharma.
Padlock, which has about 10 employees in Cambridge and San Diego, has been working on about a half dozen early-stage drug candidates to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases such as lupus and multiple sclerosis.
Padlock founder and chief executive Michael Gilman, who worked closely with investor Atlas Venture to hatch Padlock, is a serial entrepreneur who previously started Stromedix and sold it to Biogen Idec in 2012 in a deal valued at up to $560 million.
Bristol-Myers has about 560 employees in Massachusetts. It operates a large drug manufacturing plant in Devens, which makes its rheumatoid arthritis drug Orencia, and has an office in Waltham.
It is also planning to open a research center in Kendall Square in 2018. The center will “focus on the company’s ongoing discovery efforts in genetically defined diseases, molecular discovery technologies, and discovery platform chemistry in state-of-the-art lab space,” said Ken Dominski, a Bristol-Myers spokesman....
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