Roche has announced that it will be acquiring Poseida Therapeutics in a deal worth $1.5bn, giving the company access to a range of cell therapy candidates and related platform technologies.
The definitive agreement builds on the companies’ existing partnership to develop off-the-shelf, or allogeneic, CAR-T cell therapies for patients with haematological malignancies.
Roche will now gain access to Poseida’s portfolio of pre-clinical and clinical allogeneic CAR-T therapies across several therapeutic areas, such as solid tumours and autoimmune disease.
This includes the biopharma’s lead programme, P-BCMA-ALLO1, which has already received Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy and Orphan Drug Designations from the US Food and Drug Administration for certain cases of multiple myeloma.
Poseida shared promising results from a phase 1 study of the BCMA-targeting candidate in September. The data presented at this year’s International Myeloma Society Annual Meeting demonstrated a 91% overall response rate (ORR) in the 23 heavily-pretreated relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma patients in an optimised lymphodepletion arm, with a 100% ORR in BCMA-naïve patients.
Levi Garraway, head of product development and chief medical officer at Roche, said: “This exciting acquisition will allow us to drive further progress in allogeneic cell therapy while leveraging the successful existing partnership with Poseida.
“We are very encouraged by the early clinical data, and this acquisition builds on our joint progress to catalyse the development of potentially first and best-in-class cell therapies in oncology, immunology and neurology.”
Under the terms of the agreement, Roche will acquire all outstanding shares of Poseida common stock for $9 per share at closing plus a non-tradeable contingent value right to receive certain milestone payments of up to $4 per share, representing a total equity value of approximately $1bn and a total deal value of up to $1.5bn.
The announcement comes just two months after Roche’s Genentech unit agreed to pay Regor Pharmaceuticals $850m upfront to acquire the biotech’s portfolio of next-generation CDK inhibitors for breast cancer.
Roche also entered into an agreement worth over $1.8bn with Flare Therapeutics earlier this month to discover small molecule treatments aimed at previously undrugged transcription factor targets in oncology.