The British drugmaker is paying up to $1 billion to buy the Belgian start-up, whose technology it sees as useful in treating cancer as well as autoimmune conditions.
AstraZeneca is bolstering its cell therapy capabilities, agreeing on Monday to pay up to $1 billion for a biotechnology startup making treatments that reprogram cells inside the body.
The British drugmaker is buying EsoBiotech, a Belgian start-up, for $425 million in cash upfront. EsoBiotech’s investors, among them Invivo Partners and UCB Ventures, could receive up to $575 million in additional pay-outs should the start-up’s programs hit certain development and regulatory milestones, AstraZeneca said in a statement.
The deal hands AstraZeneca a technology designed to make cell therapies that can be administered through a single infusion, rather than via a complicated process that involves genetically manipulating cells in a lab. These so-called in vivo cell therapies, if successful, would help broaden the reach of traditional cell therapies, and be more convenient and accessible as well.
Several biotechs are pursuing in vivo cell therapy research, among them well-funded startups like Capstan Therapeutics and Umoja Biopharma. Some, such as Interius BioTherapeutics and EsoBiotech, have programs in early clinical testing. EsoBiotech in December started human testing of a multiple myeloma cell therapy called ESO-T01.
That therapy, like others EsoBiotech is developing, uses what it calls novel, “highly targeted” lentiviruses to deliver genetic instructions into immune cells. This reprogramming process is done inside the body through an intravenous injection that takes “minutes” rather than the multiday or week turnaround typically associated with CAR-T therapy, AstraZeneca said.
AstraZeneca intends to use the technology to advance therapies for cancer as well as autoimmune diseases, the latter of which is a growing research focus for cell therapy companies. EsoBiotech has already been doing so with ESO-T01, which turns immune cells against a protein on B cells that become cancerous in multiple myeloma and malfunction in inflammatory disorders.
EsoBiotech’s technology “has the potential to transform cell therapy and will enable us to scale these innovative treatments so that many more patients around the world can access them,” said Susan Galbraith, the company’s executive vice president of oncology and hematology research and development, in a statement.
The acquisition is also the latest investment in cell therapy research by AstraZeneca. The company wasn’t part of the initial wave of industry interest into this field. But over the last few years it has been building up internal capabilities and cutting deals with biotechs focused on newer approaches, such as donor-derived treatments or therapies made from different immune cells. An acquisition of Gracell Biotechnologies gave it an autoimmune cell therapy, too, though much of that research remains early.
EsoBiotech “will accelerate and expand the impact of our recent investments and marks a major step forward in realizing our ambition to harness the full potential of cell therapy,” Galbraith said in the statement.
More broadly, AstraZeneca’s interest could help rejuvenate a field that’s been struggling through an investment slump. Large pharmaceutical companies’ desire for cell and gene therapy acquisitions “could continue to grow” as they look for ways to mitigate the impact of patent expirations and drug-price negotiations, wrote Baird analyst Jack Allen, in a Monday note to clients.
“[M]any speculate that large pharmas will need to execute acquisitions in order to preserve their top lines,” he wrote, and cell and gene therapies could be appealing targets because of “complicated manufacturing processes” that could protect them from generic competition.
“While we’ve seen some M&A in this space to date, we believe an increase in large pharma/biotech appetite here could provide a key tailwind of this subsector,” Allen added.
