As part of the collaboration, Johnson & Johnson will have an exclusive option to acquire Sail Biomedicines for an additional $2.58 billion.
Johnson & Johnson has partnered with Flagship Pioneering’s Sail Biomedicines to advance in vivo CAR T therapies for immune-mediated conditions in a deal worth up to $925 million initially. But the healthcare giant has also snagged rights to buy the whole ship someday.
Under the terms of the agreement, announced Wednesday afternoon, J&J will put forward a total of $785 million in initial payments, including a $465 million equity investment into Sail. The biotech also stands to receive up to $140 million in development-based milestones. The deal also gives J&J an exclusive option to acquire Sail down the line for $2.58 billion.
The partnership is “an important step for JNJ’s Immunology R&D efforts,” Leerink told investors in a Wednesday note. The potential acquisition could also happen “in the near term,” the firm speculated, pointing to J&J’s announcement of the deal, where the pharma projected that the buyout could dilute earnings outcomes this year and next year.
J&J, however, hasn’t set a timeline for the acquisition, nor did it say that a takeover would definitely take place.
Sail brings to the table a proprietary platform that delivers genetic instructions directly to target cells, allowing patients to produce their own CAR T constructs inside the body. Sail sets itself apart from other in vivo CAR T players by using a technology called endless RNA, which maintains protein expression “longer than conventional mRNA,” according to its website.
Endless RNA, in turn, “has the potential to improve dose potency and support superior therapeutic activity across a broader range of diseases and protein types,” the biotech claims.
J&J hopes to leverage this approach to develop novel therapies for immune-mediated diseases, strengthening its “position at the forefront of immune system reprogramming and immune reset,” according to its release. The pharma hasn’t specified which diseases will be addressed through the partnership.
Under the terms of Wednesday’s deal, J&J will also work with Sail to advance the biotech’s lead program for autoimmune diseases, though not much has been revealed about this as of yet.
J&J is a leading player in the CAR T game, with the FDA-approved multiple myeloma therapy Carvykti, which was developed in partnership with Legend Biotech under a December 2017 agreement. Carvykti made $657 million in the second quarter, representing nearly 50% year-on-year growth.
But the pharma has yet to publicly disclose any clinical in vivo CAR T candidates, and Sail marks its first foray into an emerging modality that H.C. Wainwright senior biotech equity research analyst Mitchell Kapoor said “can fundamentally change how healthcare practitioners administer cell therapy.”
In vivo CAR T “could shorten time to infusion, cut the cost of cell therapy, and ultimately broaden access to hundreds of thousands of patients”—key barriers to uptake for current CAR T medicines, he told BioSpace earlier this month.
Other Big Pharma companies are also investing in this modality, including Eli Lilly, which just this year has made two big-ticket acquisitions to boost its in vivo CAR T capabilities. The first was Lilly’s $2.4 billion play for Orna Therapeutics in February, followed by the $7 billion takeover of Kelonia Therapeutics in April.
AbbVie and AstraZeneca have also signed in vivo CAR T deals in recent years.
