Activist investor Carl Icahn won a seat on Biogen Idec Inc.'s board of directors, and the results of a vote for a second seat are "too close to call," the company said.
Mr. Icahn, who owns about 5.6% of Biogen and favors its break-up or sale, has claimed his candidates won two seats on Biogen's 13-member board, after a months-long proxy fight that ended Wednesday with a raucous shareholder meeting in Cambridge, Mass.
After almost two years as an outsider and critic of Biogen, Mr. Icahn now has a toehold on its board and access to internal discussions at the company, which has a market value of about $15.4 billion and sells three drugs for cancer, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis.
Mr. Icahn's victory, after a failed effort last year, suggests shareholders have grown frustrated with Biogen's stagnant share prices and a gap in its pipeline of new drugs. The company's most recent addition, the MS drug Tysabri, was introduced in 2004. Biogen says it has recently reinvigorated its pipeline and now has nine drugs in late-stage development.
"It's a badly run company, and there's a lot of waste to it," Mr. Icahn said in an interview. He has suggested that Biogen be split up -- reversing its 2003 merger of Biogen and IDEC Pharmaceuticals -- or sold to a large pharmaceutical company.
Mr. Icahn said investments in biotech yielded a "double whammy." "If you clean them up, you get a more streamlined company," he said. But also, "you can get big premiums today, and that's the real plus," he said. "Big Pharma should own them. Big Pharma has the money to pay for the research."
A Biogen spokeswoman said it was "time to move beyond colorful rhetoric and focus instead on working together." The company has said a break-up would be unworkable, and has doubted that it would result in gains for current shareholders. The company said it couldn't find a buyer when it looked for one at Mr. Icahn's prodding in late 2007.
Biogen's chairman, Bruce Ross, said "we welcome our new director" -- Icahn fund manager Alexander Denner -- "and look forward to working together."
Shareholders also elected two incumbents to the board. Biogen said it would wait for a tabulation from a company hired to count votes independently, IVS Associates Inc., before announcing the results of the fourth seat. Such a count could take one to three weeks, Biogen said.
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