Johnson & Johnson secured rights to prizlon-cel in 2023 for $245 million upfront. The asset in June last year showed a 100% response rate as a second-line option in a Phase 1b study for 10 patients with relapsed or refractory large B cell lymphoma.
Johnson & Johnson has given up on an investigational CAR T therapy for large B cell lymphoma that the pharma had previously licensed from AbelZeta Pharma.
Rights to the asset, dubbed prizloncabtagene autoleucel (prizlon-cel), were returned to AbelZeta in July, the U.S.- and China-based company said in a Sunday release. Prizlon-cel is being developed for the treatment of third- or later-line large B cell lymphoma (LBCL).
J&J through its former Janssen subsidiary fronted $245 million in May 2023 to secure the exclusive right to develop and commercialize prizlon-cel—alongside other CAR T assets—outside the Greater China region. The pharma at the time also agreed to pay certain development, regulatory and sales milestones, though these remain undisclosed.
A few months later, in December that year, the companies amended the agreement to give J&J the option to obtain the exclusive rights to prizlon-cel in China. The financial terms of this arrangement were likewise kept under wraps.
BioSpace has reached out to J&J for more details regarding the decision to return prizlon-cel to AbelZeta and the status of the partnership. The asset no longer appears on J&J’s pipeline page.The pharma listed prizlon-cel—which it labeled JNJ-4496—in its full-year 2025 report in January, but the molecule no longer appeared in the company’s first quarter presentation in April.
In June last year, J&J released Phase 1b data showing that prizlon-cel elicited a treatment response in all dosed patients with relapsed or refractory LBCL who had undergone one prior line of therapy. Eight of the 10 patients showed a complete response. For the 12 patients receiving the candidate as a third-line treatment, overall response rate was 92% and complete response rate was 75%.
Analysts from Truist Securities at the time called these outcomes “compelling,” representing what they said would be an “encouraging step up” from Gilead’s Yescarta, currently the standard of care in LBCL. Yescarta’s complete response rate is 65% in the second-line setting, according to its label.
The decision to divest prizlon-cel comes as J&J buffs up other areas of its CAR T portfolio. Late last month, the pharma paid $785 million upfront—and earmarked up to $140 million—to partner with Sail Biomedicines to advance in vivo CAR T therapies for immune indications. The agreement also gives J&J the option to outright acquire Sail in the future for $2.58 billion.
