Novartis Increases Stake in Alnylam

Wade Roush5/8/08

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY), a Cambridge, MA, biotech firm working on RNAi-based therapies, said today that pharmaceutical giant Novartis had exercised an option to purchase approximately $5.4 million worth of Alnylam’s unregistered shares (i.e. restricted shares that were never offered for sale on the public market). The purchase boosts Novartis’s ownership stake in Alnylam slightly, from 13 percent to 13.4 percent.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.