The US Federal Trade Commission took aim at the biopharma industry last year with a series of aggressive enforcement actions in the M&A arena. For the first time it challenged a pharma merger based on a novel theory of anticompetitive harm. It also succeeded in terminating a licensing deal involving a single asset, unraveled a company’s reacquisition of an entity it had spun out, and blocked a merger of leaders in programmatic advertising to health care providers.
These actions have changed the merger landscape for companies, which are likely to face further hurdles this year as the...
