Drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb and biotech company Celgene have found a buyer for a Celgene drug that had stood in the way of the former’s acquisition of the latter.

New York-based BMS said Monday that Celgene had agreed to sell the psoriasis drug Otezla (apremilast) to Thousand Oaks, California-based Amgen for $13.4 billion. The deal is contingent on BMS entering a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission and the closing of BMS’ deal to buy Summit, New Jersey-based Celgene for $74 billion, which they announced in January. The deal is expected to close by the end of this year.

Shares of Celgene were up 3.7 percent in premarket trading on the Nasdaq Monday following the announcement. The company’s stock remained up about 3.7 percent after markets opened. Shares of BMS were up about 4 percent on the New York Stock Exchange, while shares of Amgen were up 2.3 percent on the Nasdaq.

“This agreement represents an important step toward completing our pending merger with Celgene,” BMS CEO Giovanni Caforio said in a statement. “It also demonstrates the tremendous achievement of the Celgene team in establishing Otezla as an important medicine for patients with psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis and Behcet’s disease.”

Amgen said the drug would complement its existing autoimmune disease business, including the drug Enbrel (etanercept) and Amgevita, its biosimilar version of AbbVie’s Humira (adalimumab).

In a note to investors, Cowen analyst Yaron Werber agreed, writing that Otezla would be highly profitable and synergistic, especially in relation to Enbrel. Currently, he wrote, the drug is approved in 54 countries but has only been launched in 32, meaning Amgen will likely launch it in additional territories, while it will also bolster the company’s presence in Europe and Japan.

Otezla won Food and Drug Administration approval for oral ulcers associated with Behcet’s disease in July.

BMS had said it would sell off Otezla in June amid concerns from the FTC about competition on the market. In particular, Otezla was seen as a competitor to BMS’ investigational TYK2 inhibitor, BMS-986165. The company announced Phase II data for the drug in September 2018, showing significant skin clearance in patients with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis.

BMS had disclosed in a March 26 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the FTC had requested information on both marketed and investigational psoriasis drugs in order to ensure its acquisition of Celgene would not harm competition.

Otezla ranks third on the list of Celgene’s top-selling drugs, with sales that reached $1.6 billion last year. Its flagship product is Revlimid (lenalidomide), a drug used for various blood cancers – principally multiple myeloma – which had sales of nearly $9.7 billion for all of 2018. The second highest-selling drug was Pomalyst (pomalidomide), also mainly used for multiple myeloma, with $2 billion in sales. Early on, some analysts had expressed concern about the deal because Revlimid will lose patent protection in the second half of the next decade, around the same period of two of BMS’ key drugs, Opdivo (nivolumab) and Eliquis (apixaban).

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