Entrance to Pfizer’s office in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Pfizer has made it clear that it is willing to open the checkbook to support growth opportunities, and on Monday the pharmaceutical giant announced the latest such deal: a $2.3 billion agreement get Trillium Therapeutics at the clinical stage, a biotechnology that uses new methods for cancer immunotherapy.
Trillium is developing drugs against CD47, which is a protein that sends out signals, and macrophages are a pathogen chewing immune cells, pronounced “don’t eat me”. Blocking this signal allows macrophages to target cancer cells. Several companies, large and small, are developing drugs that also work in this way, but Andy Schmelz, Pfizer’s global president of oncology, says that Trillium’s molecules may be safer than other molecules in this emerging category. ,More effective.
“Although we are not number one, we are very optimistic about first-class opportunities from today’s situation,” he said on a conference call on Monday.
According to the terms of the acquisition agreement, Pfizer will pay $18.50 per share for Trillium that it does not already own. This is more than 200% premium to the stock’s closing price of $6.09 last Friday. But the purchase price is still lower than the company’s peak of $20.96 per share in the past year.In the past month, the biotech company’s share price has been close to a 52-week low-well below Pfizer paid $10.88 per share when it made a $25 million equity investment in Trillium last year.
Trillium operates between Mississauga, Ontario and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two CD47-targeted drugs are in early clinical development. Both TTI-622 and TTI-621 are fusion proteins designed to block CD47. But blocking the “don’t eat me” signal is only half the battle. Trillium molecules also bind to receptors on macrophages, triggering the “eat me” signal. Schmeltz said that these drugs have shown early promise in blood cancers, which express CD47 protein in large quantities. He added that these drugs also show potential for solid tumors, which have always been a more difficult target for immunotherapy.
April, Trillium Report Preliminary data from a Phase 1b/2 study of 43 patients who tested its two molecules. Among patients with recurrence of lymphoma or resistance to treatment, the overall response rate to TTI-622 was 33%. This reaction has been observed in many types of lymphoma. In the updated data as of late July, the durability and effectiveness of the treatment continued to be maintained, with a response rate of 30%. For TTI-621, the first batch of data in April showed that the overall response rate for relapsed or refractory T-cell and B-cell lymphoma was 18% to 29%. Pfizer did not report the updated data for this molecule in July.
In addition to efficacy and durability, the Trillium molecule also achieves key safety measures. One of the challenges for drugs that block CD47 is that this protein is also present in red blood cells, so it can also target these oxygen-carrying cells in the blood. When this happens, the patient will develop anemia. Jeff Settleman, chief scientific officer of Pfizer’s oncology, said that TTI-622 and TTI-621 have minimal binding to red blood cells. These results show that compared with other CD47-targeted drugs, trillium molecules can reduce the risk of anemia while increasing the therapeutic index—how many drugs can be used to provide benefits before the toxicity becomes too high.
“We believe it is possible to provide lower but still effective doses of these molecules,” Settleman said.
Settleman added that the Trillium molecule has the potential to be used as a monotherapy or as part of a drug combination with currently approved Pfizer drugs and drug candidates still under development. Other companies have similar ideas. CD47 has become an attractive target because the company hopes to expand beyond checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy that blocks PD1 or PD-L1.
Gilead Sciences is the company that has gone the farthest among CD47 targeting companies, and its magrolimab is the antibody that the company added to its product line through its product line last year. Acquired 47Magrolimab is currently in the late stage of clinical development for myelodysplastic syndrome and acute myeloid leukemia.Other drugs chasing CD47 blocking drugs include AbbVie collaborates with Tianjing BioThe drug of the Shanghai-based biotech company, which is also an antibody, is in the early stage of clinical development.
Pfizer has been making deals to strengthen its anti-cancer drug pipeline.A month ago, the New York-based pharmaceutical giant announced a In an alliance focused on the development and commercialization of the company’s main drugs, pledged $1 billion to Arvinas in the clinical stage In breast cancer. Arvinas is developing drugs based on targeted protein degradation, which use cellular processes to process old proteins as a way to get rid of disease-causing proteins.
The acquisition of Trillium will require the approval of two-thirds of the company’s shareholders, as well as regulatory approvals from the United States and Canada.
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