Amy L. Toro

Covington & Burling LLP

San Francisco

Transactions

As a partner at Covington & Burling in San Francisco, Toro oversees transactions in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, including clinical trial agreements, joint ventures and product development funding deals.

She advised pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline on a collaboration deal with Vir Biotechnology, in which it made a $250 million equity investment to find coronavirus solutions. Solidified on April 6, the collaboration focuses on identifying anti-coronavirus compounds, researching vaccines and proceeding with clinical trials in three to five months.

"I'm always learning something because it's a very dynamic industry as you can see with COVID-19 constantly changing and evolving," Toro said. "I didn't come from a science background, but I enjoy learning about new technologies."

In her 20 years at Covington, she has advised biotechnology company Gilead Sciences on many transactions, including a $3.95 billion research and development collaboration last July with Belgium-based pharmaceutical company Galápagos NV. The 10-year agreement gave Gilead access to Galápagos' current and future pipeline outside of Europe and its differentiated drug discovery platform.

"A company alone can take and do these things itself, but there's a very long tradition in the industry of partnering and bringing the best from small companies that often have a good focus on research and development and marrying it to an organization that has familiarity with doing clinical trials and expertise in regulatory filings," Toro said.

In addition to advising on collaborations, Toro helped restructure Gilead's commercial arrangements for its HIV products in Japan in order to establish a commercial presence there. The company paid $559 million to Japan Tobacco's pharmaceutical arm, the former developer and distributor of its products in that market, to obtain the rights to market and distribute the HIV products itself in Japan.

Working with teams across the world to get products to market and available to patients is just one of the many challenges Toro has faced while working as a transactional attorney. Tight deadlines, establishing new partnerships and getting smaller companies the resources they need to conduct clinical trials and research are all driving forces in deals, according to Toro.

Although every deal has its unique challenges, Toro said she hopes to continue working in an industry that creates meaningful improvements for patients and stay engaged in deal work.

-- Morgan Keith