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Amylin Pharmaceuticals, which spurned a $3.5 billion takeover bid from Bristol-Myers Squibb and is fending off a lawsuit from activist investor Carl Icahn, started reaching out to potential buyers last week, sources familiar with the situation said on Sunday.
Amylin, maker of diabetes drugs Byetta and Bydureon, has hired Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs as its financial advisers and Skadden Arps as its legal adviser, the sources said.
Amylin and its advisers declined to comment.
Analysts have said several drug companies could be potential buyers for Amylin, including AstraZeneca, Merck & Co., and Takeda Pharmaceutical.
The move comes amid broader consolidation in the healthcare sector. Big pharmaceutical companies have been making aggressive bids for promising biotech firms and other targets as they look to find new products and replenish their pipelines. These big firms are also flush with cash and have easy access to debt to do deals. But often they find the targets, whose shares are sometimes depressed, holding out for a better price.
Other such bids in the health-care sector in recent months include an aborted $6.8 billion hostile takeover attempt by Swiss drugmaker for genetic specialist Illumina, and a bid by GlaxoSmithKline to buy long-time partner Human Genome Sciences for about $2.6 billion.
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