Bluebird生物公司1亿千百百万美元收购Pregenen

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著名的基因疗法开发者Bluebird公司最近宣布以1亿5千6百万美元的价格收购了Pregenen基因技术公司。而后者以其先进的基因编程技术闻名。整个协议包括了1580万美元的股份兑换和1500万美元的里程碑基金。

Bluebird生物技术公司一直致力于新一代基因疗法技术的开发，公司在2013年与Celgene公司合作开发CAR-T疗法。无独有偶，Pregenen公司也在这一领域有着自己的独特优势。就在不久前，公司还与辉瑞公司签订了合作研发CAR-T疗法的协议。显然，Bluebird生物技术公司希望通过此次收购案进一步奠定公司在该领域的优势。

详细英文报道：

The gene therapy pioneer bluebird bio has snapped up a biotech outfit skilled in gene-editing and cell-signaling tech in a deal valued at up to $156 million, including about $16 million worth of its stock.

The deal breaks down like this: Bluebird ($BLUE) is handing over $15.8 million worth of stock to the owners of Pregenen--or Precision Genome Engineering--while assuming about $5 million in liabilities, reserving $15 million for some near-term preclinical milestones plus another $20.1 million for clinical goals. The backend commercial milestones outlined in the pact for successful marketing efforts in the future add up to another $99.9 million.

In exchange, bluebird is absorbing a Seattle-based company that claims some advanced skills in one of the hottest areas of drug development. Bluebird, which has been building its reputation in next-gen gene therapies, struck a deal with Celgene ($CELG) back in 2013 agreeing to explore Baylor's work in CAR-Ts--or chimeric antigen receptors--aimed at engineering T cells generated by the immune system into cancer killers. And this deal today is aimed at whetting bluebird's edge in the field.

Back in 2011 Pregenen boasted in a release concerning a new collaboration with Cellectis--which just days ago inked its own sweeping CAR-T pact with Pfizer--that the company spun out of the Northwest Genome Engineering Consortium, which included investigators from the Seattle Children's Research Institute, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington. The two research centers also helped spawn Juno Therapeutics, one of the leaders in CAR-T research which is racing a rival program out of the University of Pennsylvania now bankrolled by Novartis ($NVS). Juno is also claiming in court that it developed the IP behind the Novartis effort, flagging yet another connection to the Seattle research hub.

"Pregenen is a recognized leader in the development and reprogramming of novel Homing Endonuclease and MegaTAL based enzymes that provide a highly specific and efficient way to silence, edit, or insert genetic components," said Pregenen co-founder Dr. Andrew Scharenberg, a physician at Seattle Children's, an investigator at the consortium and a professor at the University of Washington. "Teaming up with bluebird allows us to further expand and translate our gene editing and cell signaling technologies into potentially new and impactful human therapeutics, and provides an opportunity to complement bluebird's established HSC and CAR-T cell product platforms to develop the next generation of gene therapy product candidates."

Cambridge, MA-based bluebird has also been testing an improved lentiviral vector needed to get a corrective beta-globin gene in place to repair their ability to produce hemoglobin in a study of LentiGlobin BB305. One of those subjects recently produced 6.6 g/dL of therapeutic betaAT87Q-globin at 4.5 months as a result of the therapy and another hit 4.2 g/dL of betaAT87Q-globin at two months--enough to prevent the need for further monthly transfusions and symptoms like severe anemia and splenomegaly, at least for now.