Vertex is partnering with a US and South Korean biotech to see if it can offer patients a better conditioning agent to make way for an infusion of Casgevy, the biotech’s recently approved sickle cell treatment.
The Boston-based biopharma will pay Orum Therapeutics $15 million upfront and as much as $930 million in biobucks (split evenly among up to three targets) for access to the small company’s targeted protein degradation technology.
In order to receive Casgevy, patients must get high-dose chemotherapy to remove cells from their bone marrow and open up space for the modified cells. Those treatments are hard on patients, and Vertex is “deliberately pursuing multiple targets and intervention approaches in parallel to achieve best-in-class conditioning for patients,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Endpoints News.
Orum’s approach works by attaching a protein degrader, rather than chemotherapy or another cytotoxic drug, to an antibody.
“Our degrader payloads, they’re very potent. But they don’t rely on DNA damage to exert the therapeutic effect unlike some conventional ADC payloads, so I think that was a good fit with a targeted conditioning agent for genetic gene editing drugs like Casgevy,” Orum CEO Sung Joo Lee told Endpoints News.
With the Orum tie-up, Vertex hopes to create degrader-antibody conjugates, or DACs, which are Orum’s twist on the red-hot field of antibody-drug conjugates. For Orum, the deal follows the sale of an oncology DAC to Bristol Myers Squibb last fall for $100 million upfront.
Merck and Merck KGaA have both tapped into the DAC space in pacts with C4 Therapeutics. Meanwhile, Pfizer (by way of Seagen) is teaming up with Nurix Therapeutics, and Firefly Bio emerged with $94 million in February to test its take on the field.
Vertex struck another conditioning agent deal last year, linking up with ImmunoGen, the decades-old ADC developer that is now owned by AbbVie. A Vertex spokesperson confirmed that the company is still working on research with ImmunoGen’s technology, as well as “novel approaches developed in-house.” The ImmunoGen deal had very similar terms to Orum’s: $15 million upfront and up to $337 million in option fees and milestones per target.
Like the ImmunoGen deal, after an undisclosed research period, Vertex can choose to hit “go” on an exclusive worldwide license and would be responsible for all R&D and commercialization.
The 40-employee Orum, with operations in Lexington, MA, and Daejeon, South Korea, is also working on an internal oncology pipeline, which includes a Phase 1 HER2-targeted asset.