Investment firm Deerfield Management is the latest to find a gem in China, which has been rising as a source of biotech innovation over the past few years.
Investment firm Deerfield Management has found a trispecific T cell engager program for portfolio company Boulevard Bio, bringing the autoimmune asset over from China for a small $20 million upfront payment.
On the back end, Beijing-based AI drug delivery company METiS TechBio could receive as much as $1.6 billion in milestones, according to the Tuesday announcement.
Boulevard has been granted worldwide rights to MTS-128, an antibody discovered via METiS’s AI-driven NanoForge platform. The trispecific approach adds another biological mechanism for the drug to latch onto, compared to a more traditional bispecific approach that has been the norm with T cell engagers.
Little is known about Boulevard, which lacks a public presence beyond Tuesday’s announcement. Back in May, METiS and Deerfield struck up a partnership to work on in vivo protein therapeutics and immunotherapies. Financial details were not revealed at the time.
METiS, which claims to be the first AI-powered drug delivery company to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, has a deep pipeline across central nervous system disease, metabolism, oncology, immunology and animal health. The most advanced asset is MTS-004, a small molecule that has completed Phase 3 testing for pseudobulbar affect, a CNS disorder that causes sudden uncontrollable laughing or crying.
Deerfield is the latest to find a gem in China, which has been rising as a source of biotech innovation over the past few years. Venture capitalists have been scouring for assets, either to license for existing companies or bring over in a NewCo form with a U.S.-based company handling development of an asset.
