Rumored Pfizer Deal to Buy CRISPR for $1.64 Billion Could Lock in CRISPR and CAR T Tech
May 29, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
The biopharma industry likes its rumors, so here’s another one. According to unnamed sources, New York-based Pfizer Inc. may be in talks with French-based Cellectis over an acquisition.
Back in June 2014, Pfizer and Cellectis inked a global strategic collaboration to develop Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell (CAR-T) immunotherapies for oncology treatment. Cellectis’s CAR-T tech platform engineers T-cells from a single donor to be used in multiple patients, as opposed to engineering a patient’s own T-cells to attack their own tumor cells.
As part of that agreement, Pfizer made an upfront payment of $80 million and agreed to fund research and development costs linked to Pfizer-selected drug targets along with four targets chosen by Cellectis. Milestone payments could reach up to $185 million per Pfizer product. In addition, Cellectis was planning to open a research site in the U.S. to facilitate collaboration with Pfizer. Part of the deal gave Pfizer a 10 percent share in the French company.
Fast-forward to this week and company insiders claim Pfizer may have offered Cellectis a deal for about $1.64 billion. Cellectis went public in March and raised more than $228 million.
Pfizer has deepened interest lately in immunotherapy. On Dec. 8, 2014, Pfizer made a strategic collaboration agreement with Belgium company iTeos Therapeutics SA. In that deal, iTeos licensed rights to Pfizer for two pre-clinical compounds that target Indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (ID01) and Tryptophan 2,3-dioxygenase (TD02). They also agreed to collaborate on finding and validating new targets involved in mechanisms involved in tumors avoiding immune responses.
“This collaboration with iTeos is another important step for Pfizer as we continue to build an industry-leading pipeline of cancer immunotherapeutics,” said Robert Abraham, senior vice president and chief scientific officer, Pfizer’s Oncology Research Unit, in a statement, “a critical facet of which is the promising class of small molecule immunomodulators.”
Pfizer also announced a deal in November 2014 with Merck KgaA in Darmstadt, Germany, to work together to develop an investigational anti-PD-L1 antibody for cancer treatment.
Will PfizerKline Become the Next Pharma Player?
The speculation surrounding a possible bid from Pfizer Inc. for struggling GlaxoSmithKline is heating up, after one closely-watched biotech analyst said in a note last week that Pfizer buying the company would “unlock access to its balance sheet and improve its tax situation.”
Gregg Gilbert, a biotech analyst at Deutsche Bank, wrote in a note to investors “Introducing PfizerKline” that he thinks a deal would be “materially accretive” for both companies. Gilbert estimated that a bid priced at $29.86 a share, via half stock and half cash, which would push up Pfizer’s earnings per share by 10 percent to 16 percent beginning in 2016.
“We believe that the company has a sense of urgency to create value by leveraging the power of its balance sheet to do needle-moving deals,” Gilbert wrote. “Since media reports in the past have pointed to the potential for a Pfizer/GSK combination, we are revisiting that theme.”
We want to know, dear readers, if you agree? Should Glaxo continue going it alone, or might Pfizer buy it and create one of the world’s largest pharma players in history?