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License Agreements
6 Months Ended
Jun. 30, 2014
Goodwill and Intangible Assets Disclosure [Abstract]  
License Agreements
License Agreements

As part of its business, the company enters into licensing agreements with third parties that often require milestone and royalty payments based on the progress of the licensed asset through development and commercial stages. Milestone payments may be required, for example, upon approval of the product for marketing by a regulatory agency, and the company may be required to make royalty payments based upon a percentage of net sales of the product. The expenditures required under these arrangements in any period may be material and are likely to fluctuate from period to period.

These arrangements sometimes permit the company to unilaterally terminate development of the product and thereby avoid future contingent payments; however, the company is unlikely to cease development if the compound successfully achieves clinical testing objectives.

In conjunction with the acquisition of NeuVaxTM, the company acquired rights and assumed obligations under a license agreement among Apthera and The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center (“MDACC”) and The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, Inc. (“HJF”) which grants exclusive worldwide rights to a U.S. patent covering the nelipepimut-S peptide and several U.S. and foreign patents and patent applications covering methods of using the peptide as a vaccine. Under the terms of this license, we are required to pay an annual maintenance fee of $200,000, a milestone payment of $200,000 upon commencing the Phase 3 PRESENT trial of NeuVax and other clinical milestone payments, as well as royalty payments based on sales of NeuVax or other therapeutic products developed from the licensed technologies.

On March 18, 2013, we acquired Abstral® (fentanyl) Sublingual Tablets for sale and distribution in the United States from Orexo AB (ORX.ST), an emerging specialty pharmaceutical company based in Sweden. Abstral has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is a transmucosal immediate-release fentanyl (TIRF) product.

Under our agreement with Orexo, we assumed responsibility for the U.S. commercialization of Abstral and for all regulatory and reporting matters in the U.S. We also agreed to establish and maintain through 2015 a specified minimum commercial field force to market, sell and distribute Abstral and to use commercially reasonable efforts to reach the specified sales milestones. Orexo is entitled to reacquire the U.S. rights to Abstral from us for no consideration if we breach our obligations to establish and maintain the requisite sales force throughout the marketing period. We expect to maintain our sales efforts beyond this date. We officially launched U.S. commercial sales of Abstral in October 2013.

In exchange for the U.S. rights to Abstral, (1) we paid Orexo $10 million upfront, and a $5 million milestone payment in cash in October 2013 upon the approval by the FDA of a specified U.S. manufacturer of Abstral; and (2) we agreed to pay to Orexo: (a) three one-time future cash milestone payments based on our net sales of Abstral; and (b) a low double-digit royalty on future net sales. No further milestone or royalty payments will be due after the date on which all claims of the last remaining licensed patents expire (currently 2019) or become invalidated by a governmental agency.

On January 12, 2014, we acquired worldwide rights to anagrelide controlled release (CR) formulation, which we renamed GALE-401, through our acquisition of Mills Pharmaceuticals, LLC ("Mills") (see Note 5), and Mills became a wholly owned subsidiary. GALE-401 contains the active ingredient anagrelide, an FDA-approved product that has been in use since the late 1990s for the treatment of essential thrombocythemia (ET). Mills holds an exclusive license to develop and commercialize anagrelide CR formulation, pursuant to a license agreement with BioVascular, Inc. Under the terms of the license agreement, Mills has agreed to pay BioVascular, Inc. a mid-to-low single digit royalty on net revenue from the sale of licensed products as well as future cash milestone payments based on the achievement of specified regulatory milestones. Mills is also responsible for patent prosecution and maintenance.