Epizyme no longer exists as a public equity, and the death of the stock is the whole story. The Cambridge epigenetics company sold itself to Ipsen Pharma SAS in a tender offer that closed in August 2022. The deal delivered 1.45 of cash per share plus one contingent value right with up to 1.00 of additional consideration. The board accepted the package after a year of sub-one stock prices, a going-concern qualification, and a failed two-year launch of its only approved drug, TAZVERIK.
The ticker is dead, the stock is deregistered, and the only live instrument in the structure is the CVR, whose payments depend on regulatory milestones in two markets the buyer now controls. A research note on a defunct ticker should therefore be a postmortem: what TAZVERIK actually sold, why the cost structure never met it, and what the 244.6 million cash payout says about how the street and the sponsors priced a commercial-stage biotech that could not fund itself.
The argument that follows rests on five named events: the FDA accelerated approvals in early 2020, the RPI royalty monetization and the BioPharma Credit term loan that followed, the Nasdaq bid-price deficiency that year, and the Ipsen merger agreement that converted all of it into a 1.45 exit. The thesis variables are TAZVERIK unit volumes, the SYMPHONY-1 confirmatory trial readout, the China rights under the HutchMed agreement, and the size of Ipsen's integration discount. Those variables, and the evidence attached to each, carry the rest of the note.