Esperion has made another deal with a financial backer for an immediate cash haul in return for future revenue.
Esperion received $304.7 million from the investor OMERS Life Sciences, the biotech announced Friday. In return, OMERS will get royalty rights to European sales of Esperion’s cholesterol-lowering bempedoic acid products until it makes back 1.7 times its investment, equal to more than $500 million.
Esperion said it used the money to pay off (at a discount) an arrangement it made with Oberland Capital and other investors in 2019. That deal originally promised Esperion $200 million in return for a percentage of the company’s US revenue from bempedoic acid in the US, where it’s sold as a monotherapy called Nexletol, and in combination with another cholesterol-lowering drug as Nexlizet.
Jefferies analysts called the prior terms “very restrictive against what ESPR could do on corporate development.”
“We believe the Esperion story has cleaned up significantly now with Oberland completely out of the picture,” they said in a note to clients.
The new deal gives Esperion “increased operational and financial flexibility,” CEO Sheldon Koenig said in a news release.
Nexletol and Nexlizet won label expansions in the US in March to prevent heart attacks and cardiovascular procedures in both primary and secondary prevention patients, regardless of statin use.
Nexletol was recently the subject of a legal dispute between Esperion and its partner Daiichi Sankyo, which the companies settled in January. Esperion claimed Daiichi owed $300 million in milestones tied to a cardiovascular trial, but Daiichi disagreed. Under the settlement, Daiichi agreed to pay $125 million to handle all regulatory communications in Europe going forward, and to take on additional manufacturing and supply responsibilities “resulting in significant cost savings and efficiencies for both companies.”