Eli Lilly seals $1bn genetics deal
Eli Lilly is expanding its genetics business with the $880 million purchase of Prevail Therapeutics, in a deal that could rise to more than $1 billion.
The agreement could see Lilly pay an additional $160 million if a product from the Prevail pipeline achieves regulatory approval within four years. Prevail focus on gene therapies for patients with Parkinson’s disease, neuronopathic Gaucher disease, and frontotemporal dementia.
"Gene therapy is a promising approach with the potential to deliver transformative treatments for patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Gaucher and dementia," said Mark Mintun, vice president of pain and neurodegeneration research at Lilly.
"The acquisition of Prevail will bring critical technology and highly skilled teams to complement our existing expertise at Lilly, as we build a new gene therapy program anchored by well-researched assets,” Mintun added.
"I'm incredibly proud of the Prevail team, who have made great progress advancing our pipeline of gene therapy programs for patients with these devastating disorders,” said Asa Abeliovich, founder and CEO of Prevail.
The announcement comes just a month after Lilly announced an exclusive licensing deal with genome editing company Precision BioSciences. Under the terms of that agreement, Precision will lead pre-clinical development of its gene-edited therapies, while Lilly will be responsible for commercialisation.
Eli Lilly has now spent more than $1 billion on expanding into the field of genetics-based therapies in the last month. The company agreed to pay $100 million as part of the exclusive licensing deal with Prevail, in addition to a $30 million equity investment in the start-up. Prevail could also be eligible to receive up to $420 million in development and commercialisation milestone payments.
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