January 5, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
Amgen is swooping in on a hot new cancer therapy, announcing Monday that it will partner with Kite Pharma on a strategic research and licensing collaboration worth an initial $60 million to develop and commercialize novel Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cell immunotherapies based on Kite‘s engineered autologous cell therapy (eACT) platform.
CAR-T therapy has been a hot commodity for biotech investors for the last few quarters, an importance recognized by the deal size, which has Amgen putting in $60 million, as well as funding for research and development costs and an additional $525 million in milestone payments for Kite if the company sees the successful completion of regulatory and commercialization milestones. It also has built-in single- to double-digit royalties for sales and the license of Kite‘s intellectual property for CAR T cell products.
For its part, Amgen said the terms of deal make it eligible to receive up to $525 million in milestone payments per Kite program, plus tiered single-digit sales royalties.
The deal will come as welcome news for Kite, who watched its primary competitor Juno Therapeutics rocket into the Wall Street stratosphere with a successful IPO that rose a whopping 60 percent at opening on Dec. 23 to $38 per share. Juno’s CEO Hans Bishop took home $100 million for his 3 percent stake in the company—success Kite is likely to try to emulate as its pushes it immuno-oncology platform to Big Biotech firms.
CAR-T therapies have been hot for several quarters as companies look to find new ways to use the body’s immune system to attack cancer. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has seen a flood of initial applications for the therapy though clinical trials have seen mixed results so far. That’s not stopping Kite executives from celebrating Monday, however.
“Amgen is an ideal partner for us, based on their strong presence in oncology and the company’s broad array of cancer targets optimally suited for combining with our CAR technologies. We are proud to announce this unique collaboration and its validation of our R&D expertise, intellectual property position, and therapeutic manufacturing and processing capabilities,” said Arie Belldegrun, Kite Pharma‘s president and chief executive officer, in a statement. “We believe that the therapeutic candidates resulting from the collaboration will have the potential to dramatically transform CAR approaches and to become some of the most powerful therapies for the treatment of cancer.”
Amgen, too, said the company was a good fit for its always-evolving cancer pipeline, which has doubled down on novel therapies in recent years in an attempt to compete with larger efforts from rivals like Merck ’s immunotherapy PD-1-blocking Keytruda. Amgen may attempt to pair Kite with its recently green-lit antibody Blincyto (blinatumomab), another immunotherapy that uses T-cells to fight cancer from within a patient’s own body.
“The intersection of immunology and oncology represents one of the most promising approaches to delivering significant impact for patients with cancer,” said Sean Harper, executive vice president of research and development at Amgen. “With our existing immuno-oncology portfolio of cutting-edge technologies and expertise, we believe joining forces with Kite Pharma will leverage our targets and their leading CAR T cell platform to advance another new promising therapeutic approach to fight cancer.”
Kite Pharma will host a live conference call and webcast today at 4 p.m. ET to discuss the transaction. To access the live webcast or replay, please visit Kite Pharma‘s Investor Relations website at http://ir.kitepharma.com.
