Mannkind gets closer to partnership

Here are some quotes of Al Mann from the Transcript of Morgan Stanley Global Healthcare Conference – Sep 13th 2010 (the questions are mine).

Why didn't the deal happen last time?

Well, we were very close to a partnership last year in October. There was a question that affected the economics that we couldn't really answer without getting some more inputs from the FDA, since we're only a couple months from approval; it was decided to defer any further discussions. So last year we got the -- what we thought what was going to be an imminent approval. We had every signal that was going to be. But it turned out not to happen and then of course ended up with a complete response letter. But one of the interesting and important conclusions of the complete response letter is that the FDA raised not a single safety concern. And what's happened since then we have a fairly clear pathway to approval. And so that's attracted a lot of people.

Partnership talks ongoing now
So we've had a lot of people talking to us on the partnership. We had frankly more than we could handle we narrowed it down or it's just the narrow down I should take to about six, who are still talking to us, and we want to let them to reduce that to maybe three or four that's probably all we can handle as we move into negotiations, so to try to compete the partnership. Now that said the companies that we had been negotiating with last year probably could complete a deal with this in a matter of few weeks the others had been gone as far, so we take several months probably. PDUFA is only 3.5 months away so which comes first I can’t tell you.

Type of Partner
Well, we are not really very interested in companies who are in the insulin business.  The reason of course is because why would they want to cannibalize some of their key products.  I mean Novalog is the most important product for Novartis [Novo Nordisk] for example.  So they wouldn't be interested in promoting our products.  So they are not really good candidates.

But Sanofi-Aventis could use a rapid acting insulin, but on the other hand we think that AFREZZA will compete effectively against Lantus in earlier stage type-II diabetes.  So we have some reservations about those, but we feel that we should deal with someone who is in the diabetes market or at least in the metabolic and endocrine markets so that they have sales forces that are dealing with the physicians in the same areas as we -- in which we're interested.