An FDA-approved drug used to maintain pupil size in patients during cataract surgery and reduce postoperative eye pain has been sold to Rayner Surgical in a deal that could exceed $1 billion after milestones.
Seattle-based Omeros sold eye drug Omidria for an upfront payment of $125 million, with another $200 million in commercial milestone payments and another $34 million that comes with an accounts receivable balance. The sale will help Omeros secure a long-term financial stream, and allow it to focus on the rest of its current pipeline while cutting commercial costs.
The deal is expected to close by Dec. 31.
Rayner will pay Omeros royalties for sales both inside and outside of the US, with a royalty rate of 50% of US sales until either Jan. 1, 2025 or the $200 million-mark, after which Omeros will get a 30% royalty rate. Outside the US, Omeros will get a 15% rate throughout the lifetime of the patent. In all, the deal is valued at about $1 billion.
The drug will be a key product in Rayner’s ophthalmology franchise, which already includes dry eye treatments, intraocular lenses and ophthalmic surgery devices. CEO Tim Clover called the product an ‘ideal fit for Rayner,’ as it expands its focus to help ophthalmic surgeons.
During the Q&A portion of the investors call, Colin Bristol, the managing director of biotechnology with UBS, asked if this sale indicated a sudden increase in costs connected to narsoplimab, the company’s monoclonal antibody of MASP-2 of the effector enzyme of the lectin pathway of the complement system. CEO Greg Demopulos insisted that the sale had nothing to do with that treatment.
‘This should reduce our expenditures in excess of $30 million annually … in respect to our plans going forward, obviously this allows us to focus on our biotech pipeline including primarily our complement franchise and the programs behind it,’ he said in the call. ‘I want to be clear that this in no way signals that we are expecting a substantial increase in costs on narsoplimab. This is frankly, a very good deal, and it’s really independent of narsoplimab.’
The company has never launched a drug in Europe before, Demopulos said on the investor call Thursday. Rayner’s presence outside of the US will help the launch of the product in the EU and UK, following EMA and UK regulatory approval. But Rayner will also assume the US-based commercial operations for Omidria, and the two companies plan to add sales representatives in the US as well.
While oncology researchers have long pursued the potential of cellular immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, it was unclear whether these therapies would ever reach patients due to the complexity of manufacturing and costs of development. Fortunately, the recent successful development and regulatory approval of chimeric antigen receptor-engineered T (CAR-T) cells have demonstrated the significant benefit of these therapies to patients.
Merck’s new antiviral molnupiravir (Quality Stock Arts / Shutterstock)
After South African scientists reported a new Covid-19 variant — dubbed Omicron by the WHO — scientists became concerned about how effective vaccines and monoclonal antibodies might be against it, which has more than 30 mutations in the spike protein.
‘I think it is super worrisome,’ Dartmouth professor and Adagio co-founder and CEO Tillman Gerngross told Endpoints News this weekend. Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel echoed similar concerns, telling the Financial Times that experts warned him, ‘This is not going to be good.’
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Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies is in the middle of a monumental point in the company’s 10-year history, and the CDMO is about to grow even more, as it sets out to be the ‘beating heart’ of the UK’s North East Life Sciences ecosystem.
A site in Billingham, Teeside, UK will receive a $453.72 million investment package from the manufacturer to double the existing footprint and create the largest multi-modal biopharmaceutical manufacturing site in the UK, bringing another 350 jobs to the region by late 2023.
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Novartis is plopping down $150 million in cash to pick up an experimental Parkinson’s drug and grab an option to another, a move that puts it on an increasingly popular path in the field’s search for disease-modifying therapies.
Belgium’s UCB is its partner of choice, supplying two small molecule alpha-synuclein misfolding inhibitors in a deal that can add up to nearly $1.5 billion.
Out of the pair, UCB0599 is already in Phase II trials, making Novartis confident enough to pull the trigger on co-development and commercialization, including to foot half of the R&D bill. The pharma giant will make a decision on UCB7853 once UCB wraps the ongoing Phase I program.
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Samsung Biologics has entered an agreement with South Korean biotech GreenLight BioSciences to manufacture its mRNA Covid-19 vaccine at commercial scale, the two companies announced.
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When GlaxoSmithKline trumpeted its return to neuroscience with a $700 million upfront deal with Alector this summer, it touted its early investments in functional genomics as a key guidepost for that deal. Now, the drug giant has partnered up with Oxford to hopefully add jet fuel to its hunt for breakthroughs in the brain.
GSK and Oxford have kickstarted a five-year collaboration aimed at spurring R&D breakthroughs across a range of hard-to-treat diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s through the use of genomic testing and machine learning, the partners said Wednesday.
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Vas Narasimhan, Novartis CEO (Thibault Camus/Pool via AP Images)
Thursday marks Novartis’ annual R&D day, and with it comes CEO Vas Narasimhan’s attempt to spotlight the company’s pipeline strategy and emerging stars.
The biggest question entering Thursday’s presentation dealt with how the big biopharma will make up revenues from upcoming generic competition — Novartis says within the next five years, generics will eat away roughly $9 billion in sales. To offset this, Narasimhan outlined a strategy for 4% growth or higher until 2026, focusing on six key medicines he believes will see multibillion dollar profits during this time.
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Wednesday rejected Moderna’s attempt to overturn key patents related to the delivery vehicle for its Covid-19 vaccine after the biotech sought to preempt a potentially risky infringement lawsuit.
For years, Moderna has been battling a tiny Pennsylvania biotech known as Arbutus over patents for a technology required to deliver its mRNA drugs and vaccines, known as lipid nanoparticles or LNP. Moderna is concerned there’s a substantial risk that Arbutus will assert the ‘069 patent in an infringement suit targeting Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, particularly as Arbutus has boasted of its patent protection and refused to grant a covenant not to sue Moderna.
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On the hunt for a better AAV capsid for gene therapy, Eric Kelsic’s Dyno Therapeutics has set itself apart with its focus on machine learning to help speed discovery. Now, Japanese drugmaker Astellas — fresh off a slate of gene therapy burns — is taking a bet on Dyno as it looks to the future.
Astellas and Dyno will work together as part of an R&D pact to develop next-gen AAV vectors for gene therapy using Dyno’s CapsidMap platform directed at skeletal and cardiac muscle, the companies said Wednesday. Under the terms of the deal, Dyno will design AAV capsids for gene therapy, while Astellas will be responsible for conducting preclinical, clinical and commercialization activities for gene therapy product candidates using the capsids.
https://endpts.com/a-seattle-biotech-offloads-lead-eye-drug-in-deal-valued-at-1b-as-it-refocuses-on-emerging-pipeline/
