By making this move, Japan’s largest drugmaker will boost its presence in cancer drugs with Velcade and enhance its pipeline as the 2011 expiration on its best-selling Actos diabetes pill draws closer. The deal comes not long after its rival, Eisai, paid $3.9 billion for MGI Pharma, which specializes in cancer meds, and only a month after Takeda and Abbott Labs agreed to split up their TAP Pharmaceutical joint venture.

Millennium markets Velcade to treat relapsed multiple myeloma in a partnership with Johnson & Johnson, which sells the treatment in 85 countries beyond the US. Last year, the drug generated $265 million in sales and helped Millenium earn a profit last year, its first in a decade, according to Bloomberg News. Takeda, by the way, will pay $25 a share, a 53 percent premium. Here is the Takeda statement.

Japanese drugmakers are expanding outside the world’s second-largest pharma market because domestic growth is hampered by the government’s policy of reducing prices every two years to curb the nation’s health bill, Bloomberg reminds us. Meanwhile, the worldwide market for cancer meds is forecast to grow 11 percent between 2006 and 2011, according to Lehman Bothers.

Here are presentations from Takeda about the deal and the look of the subsequent US operations.