Adapt Pharma Ltd.

Adapt Pharma Ltd. (also styled Adapt Pharma Operations Ltd. and, in the U.S., ADAPT Pharma, Inc.) is an Irish specialty pharmaceutical company founded in Dublin in late 2013/2014 by Seamus Mulligan and a team from Azur Pharma. Its corporate headquarters are in Dublin, with U.S. headquarters in Radnor, Pennsylvania. It was privately held and is no longer independent: Emergent BioSolutions Inc. (NYSE: EBS) agreed in August 2018 to acquire it for up to $735 million ($635 million upfront plus up to $100 million in sales milestones), closing in October 2018; Emergent brought on roughly 50 Adapt employees in the U.S., Canada, and Ireland. Irish filings for Adapt Pharma Operations Ltd. reported revenues of about $134.9 million and pretax profit of about $40.7 million in its last full year before the sale.

Adapt's business was narrowly focused on opioid overdose and addiction. Its flagship — and essentially only marketed — product was NARCAN (naloxone HCl) Nasal Spray 4 mg, the first FDA-approved needle-free intranasal naloxone for emergency treatment of known or suspected opioid overdose (approved November 2015, launched in the U.S. in early 2016, later approved in Canada). The company licensed the intranasal naloxone technology from Lightlake Therapeutics (now Opiant Pharmaceuticals) and distributed NARCAN to first responders, health agencies, and retail pharmacies, while developing an early-stage pipeline of additional overdose/addiction treatments.

Adapt's litigation posture was that of an operating pharmaceutical company and patent enforcer, not an NPE. The single tracked case lists it as a defendant — Nalox-1 Pharmaceuticals, LLC v. Adapt Pharma Ltd. et al. (PTAB, filed 2019-02-19), an inter partes review in which Adapt was a patent owner defending Orange Book patents covering NARCAN. Nalox-1 filed a large set of IPR petitions against those patents; the Board instituted on three and, in August 2020, upheld the challenged claims. Separately, Adapt asserted the same patents in district court against Teva (D.N.J.) and Perrigo, where some claims were held invalid — the subject of a Federal Circuit appeal decided in 2022.