ImClone asks JPMorgan for deal advice

ImClone may have rejected Bristol-Myers Squibb's buyout advances so far, but now the company is hiring a financial adviser to help it study the offer--and analyze its own internal proposal to split itself into two businesses. ImClone tapped JPMorgan Chase as its financial helpmeet, to sift the details of Bristol's bid and compare it with the shareholder benefit of carving up the company, with one chunk devoted to pipeline and the other to Erbitux, its superstar cancer med.

Who, we wonder, is giving ImClone legal advice? As you know, there's been some back-and-forth about the rights to a potential Erbitux follow-up in ImClone's pipeline. Bristol says its Erbitux partnership with ImClone gives it a piece of the successor. ImClone says it's the candidate's sole owner. Seems to us that clearing up that little detail would be necessary for any kind of accurate number-crunching. But we're not lawyers (or number-crunchers).

- read the story in the New York Times

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