Bristol CEO eyes non-oncology biotech deals

By Ransdell Pierson

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The chief executive of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co (BMY.N) said his company, which earlier on Thursday bid $4.5 billion for cancer-drug partner ImClone Systems Inc IMCL.O, is widening its hunt for biotech companies or products that treat diseases other than cancer.

"I think we'd like to go wider" than oncology, Jim Cornelius said in an interview, "because we have research and development expertise and focus on 10 disease states," including arthritis, diabetes and cardiovascular ailments.

Cornelius said biotech products -- injectable proteins made in living cells that narrowly target other proteins which cause specific diseases -- will increasingly overshadow synthetically made oral medicines that have long been the mainstay of drugmakers.

"I don't think we'd like to be exclusively biotech, but we're certainly moving more in that direction."

Cornelius said Bristol-Myers this year has been surveying "a universe of 2,000 biotech companies" to see which ones best fit the company's criteria.

"There are an awful lot of biotechs with market capitalizations under $1 billion," he said, but did not predict how many Bristol-Myers might approach in coming years.

Bristol-Myers now well understands ImClone, after almost seven years of co-marketing its Erbitux treatment for colon cancer and head and neck cancer, and also is very familiar with ImClone's pipeline of experimental biotech drugs, Cornelius said.

"We've gotten through the dating stage; we're now at the marriage-proposal stage."

ImClone may take days to study and respond to Bristol's $60-a-share bid, he said. "My own experience from other deals is that you have to schedule a board meeting and have to get your bankers lined up, so this will probably be measured in days."

Bristol-Myers said Cornelius on Thursday made the offer by phone to ImClone chairman, Carl Icahn, who took control of ImClone in October 2006 after a two-month boardroom battle.

Global sales of Erbitux jumped 33 percent to $423 million in the second quarter, and Cornelius said Icahn deserves much of the credit for the drug's recent success.

"I think ImClone is a better company for having had him as chairman. He's brought a new focus on Erbitux and the sales force implementation and he's a very enthusiastic and optimistic guy. He's been very positive."

(Reporting by Ransdell Pierson, editing by Phil Berlowitz; editing by Carol Bishopric)