Who Is ImClone's Mystery Date?

Oh, Carl, you tease!

Biotech company ImClone Sysems has, as expected, spurned an offer of $60 per share from Bristol-Myers Squibb as "inadequate."

You see, ImClone's chairman, Carl Icahn, has flirting with someone more attractive. Icahn, the company says, "has had several conversations with the chief executive officer of a large pharmaceutical company." That suitor has proposed a $70-per-share offer, or more than $6 billion.

Nearly as important in these credit-crunched times, is that this offer is "not subject to financing."

So who is ImClone's mystery suitor?

The global drug giants are the obvious suspects, especially GlaxoSmithKline or Novartis, which have been trying to build up their cancer-drug pipeline.

Big drug companies have been looking at biotech to produce new drugs and have been willing to make large acquisitions. In July, Roche of Switzerland offered to buy the rest of Genentech that it does not already own for nearly $44 billion.

The list of potential buyers is fairly small -- it's probably not Roche, Pfizer, which has made a big investment in cancer research or Merck -- so it is a little surprising that no one has sussed out who Icahn has been talking to. And as Jacob Goldstein points out on the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog, "given that Bristol-Myers already holds a 17 percent stake in ImClone, is there really room for another suitor?"

To be sure, Icahn is not always the smoothest matchmaker: his desperate efforts to hook Yahoo up with Microsoft this summer were something of an embarrassment.

But one happy wedding can make up for all those bad dates.

"This is Carl Icahn making it very clear this is where he thinks the bidding should start at,'' Michael King, an analyst with Rodman & Renshaw, told Bloomberg News.

The coy act is clearly working: Shares of ImClone are up 7 percent in late morning trading.

And Icahn, who owns 13 percent of ImClone stands to be a big winner regardless of the final price. The New York Times DealBook blog notes that he stands to more than double his money even at $60 per share.