Vertex Pharmaceuticals commits $45 million upfront to leverage Enlaza Therapeutics’ War-Lock platform to create drug conjugates and T cell engagers for autoimmune diseases and gentler conditioning for sickle cell/beta thalassemia gene-editing therapy Casgevy.
The immunology and inflammation space continues to fire on all cylinders as Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Enlaza Therapeutics locked in a front-loaded pact to develop small format drug conjugates and T cell engagers for autoimmune diseases and improved conditioning in patients with sickle cell disease or beta thalassemia who are treated with Vertex’s gene-editing therapy Casgevy.
The deal will see Enlaza receive $45 million upfront, including an equity investment, and a potential $2 billion more in future milestone payments. Vertex is paying to leverage the company’s proprietary War-Lock platform, which creates highly specific warheads that covalently bind to drug targets of interest, according to a Tuesday press release announcing the collaboration. This “white-space” technology generates protein drugs that retain the selectivity of small format biologics while expanding the therapeutic window and enabling more effective therapies across numerous therapeutic modalities, according to Enlaza.
So far, the platform “has demonstrated compelling promise in oncology, and this strategic collaboration marks a key inflection point as we expand into autoimmune indications,” Enlaza CEO Sergio Duron said in a prepared statement on Tuesday.
On the Vertex side, Mark Bunnage, senior vice president of Global Research, said in a statement that the company “is committed to developing transformative therapies for serious diseases that fit within our unique R&D strategy including certain autoimmune diseases and gentler conditioning for Casgevy, the first and only approved CRISPR/Cas9 gene-edited therapy.” Casgevy—which Vertex developed with partner CRISPR Therapeutics—won FDA approval in December 2023 for sickle cell disease and for beta thalassemia in January 2024.
La Jolla, California–based Enlaza, which bills itself as “the first covalent biologics platform company,” raised $100 million in series A financing in April 2024. This followed the company’s December 2022 launch, in which it closed on $61 million in seed financing to build a pipeline of covalent biologics with an initial focus on cancer. The biotech’s website does not currently list a pipeline.
The immunology and inflammation (I&I) space—which includes autoimmune diseases—has seen a tremendous amount of investment activity during the past couple of years, with big names like Sanofi and Gilead making major splashes. In July alone, GSK bet up to $12 billion in a pact with China’s Hengrui Pharma to advance up to 12 novel therapies for respiratory, immunology and oncology indications, and Bristol Myers Squibb spun out a new company with five immunology assets and $300 million in funds from Bain Capital.
