New deals brighten new year
Tuesday, 12 January 2010 17:52 | 
The new year brought new deals and collaboration action in the pharmaceutical and bio-tech sectors.
The new year began with a strong start as one megadeal, a few smaller collaborations, and several venture capital financings were announced. Novartis (NVS), which bought $10.4 billion of Alcon (ACL) equity from Nestle (NSRGY.PK) in April of 2008, exercised its option to purchase the rest of Nestle’s stake for $180 per share in cash for a total of $28.1 billion. That will make Novartis the owner of approximately 77 percent of the global eye care company. Novartis is also seeking to merge the 23 percent of Alcon it will not own into Novartis, offering minority shareholders 2.8 shares of Novartis for each Alcon share, which values the transaction at $153 a share or another $11.2 billion. Alcon markets drugs for glaucoma and other eye diseases and has several experimental drugs in the pipeline.Original Article: Biotech Gets a Strong Start in Financing for the New Year -- Seeking Alpha