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Acambis: Can Smallpox Sustain?

 
• By Melanie Senior

The UK's Acambis became one of a handful of European biotechs to post profits this year, boosted by a US government smallpox vaccine contract worth $428 million. The profitability label is a useful one these days: cautious investors find it easier to swallow R&D risk if accompanied by earnings. And Acambis' management has promised it can keep the company in the black, defying the skeptics. Near-term, it will leverage its smallpox franchise to secure further, and extended, government contracts. Beyond that, Acambis' pipeline of relatively low-risk products should start to come to fruition.

Acambis PLC 's progression to profitability is about opportunities spotted and seized, focus and luck. Buying US group OraVax in 1998 was probably the company's shrewdest single move [See Deal]. It focused the group's activities on vaccines, an increasingly high growth area, providing two safe, effective technologies that underlie most of Acambis' current pipeline. OraVax also had a manufacturing plant on the East Coast, which Acambis initially tried to sell, since it had been idle for five years. There were no buyers at the time—luckily, as it turned out.

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