A Japanese drugmaker is moving further into high-end therapeutics with the acquisition of a private company developing cell therapies.
Tokyo-based Astellas Pharma said Thursday that it had bought South San Francisco, California-based Xyphos Biosciences for $665M. The deal, they said, would give Astellas access to Xyphos’ cell therapy development platform, called Advanced Cellular Control through Engineered Ligands, or ACCEL.
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“At Astellas, immuno-oncology is a primary focus of our research and development strategy, and we are working on the development of next-generation cancer immuno-therapy using new modalities [and] technologies,” Astellas CEO Kenji Yasukawa said in a statement. “The innovative technology in development at Xyphos fits perfectly in advancing our immuno-oncology strategy to create and deliver value for patients.”
Xyphos’ pipeline includes five product candidates, all in preclinical development or discovery. It anticipates getting its first product candidate, a CAR-T cell therapy, into clinical development in 2021. The company calls its cells “convertibleCAR,” with the acronym standing for chimeric antigen receptor. The technology is designed to direct immune cells to target single or multiple proteins on the surfaces of cancer cells while controlling cell proliferation and endurance.
The acquisition of Xyphos marks Astellas’ second such deal in less than a month. In early December, it announced it would spend $3 billion to acquire San Francisco-based Audentes Therapeutics, a company developing gene therapies for inherited disorders. The lead product of Audentes, which will act as an independent subsidiary of Astellas, is AT132, currently in Phase I/II development for X-linked myotubular myopathy, or XLMTM, a rare genetic disease that causes extreme muscle weakness, respiratory failure and death. The company is also developing gene therapies for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Pompe disease and others.
The two deals illustrate how important cell and gene therapies have become for a growing number of biopharma companies. Indeed, two of the most publicized deals this year – Roche’s acquisition of Spark Therapeutics and Bristol-Myers Squibb’s acquisition of Celgene – were centered in part on the acquired companies’ focus on cell and gene therapies. Spark developed the first gene therapy to win Food and Drug Administration approval, Luxturna (voretigene neparvovec-rzyl), for an inherited form of blindness, and has several additional gene therapies in its pipeline, including in Phase III development. Meanwhile, Celgene took control of Juno Therapeutics’ CAR-T cell pipeline last year, including lisocabtagene maraleucel, for which the company presented positive data in non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the American Society of Hematology meeting earlier this month.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
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