Covington Advises Heptares Therapeutics on its Sale to Sosei Group

Covington Advises Heptares Therapeutics on its Sale to Sosei Group

February 27, 2015

LONDON, February 27, 2015 — Covington advised Heptares Therapeutics Limited on its announced sale to Sosei Group, a Tokyo-listed Japanese biopharmaceutical company with operations in Japan and the UK. Consideration consisted of $180 million cash at closing and up to an additional $220 million contingent upon the successful progression of Heptares’ pipeline and platform.
 
Heptares is a clinical-stage private UK-based biotechnology company focused on creating novel medicines targeting G protein-coupled receptors, a superfamily of membrane proteins found in every cell in the body that are crucial to communication between cells. It has a clinical and preclinical pipeline of potentially transformative new medicines targeting serious diseases with major unmet need, e.g. Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD, metabolic disease, schizophrenia, migraine, and others, and a high potential StaR® drug discovery platform.

The core Covington team included James Gubbins, Guy Dingley, Tom Goodman and Aysha Qureshi. Further support was provided by Kristian Wiggert and Emma Heffernan (corporate); Chris Bracebridge and Antonio Michaelides (employment); Morag Peberdy, Daniel Pavin, Lucinda Osborne and David Dennis (IP); Hilary Prescott (property) and Sarah Cowlishaw (regulatory).