Biotech group Cellectis in takeover talks with Pfizer
Cellectis, the French biotech company, is in talks about its potential sale with Pfizer of the US considered to be among the buyers.
Two people familiar with the situation said Cellectis was in negotiations over a deal, but warned no outcome was certain. One person said Pfizer had approached the company about a deal that could value it at as much as €1.5bn.
The US drug company already owns 9.47 per cent of Cellectis after the pair forged a partnership to develop cancer drugs.
It is unclear if other parties were also in the sale talks with Cellectis. Pfizer declined to comment and Cellectis had no immediate comment.
An acquisition of Cellectis would strengthen Pfizer’s push to become a serious player in a new category of cancer drugs called immuno-oncology. The French company, which raised $228m in a Nasdaq initial public offering in March, specialises in a type of treatment known as Car-T therapy seen as one of the hottest areas of drug development.
Shares in Cellectis fell 3.3 per cent to €36.75 in Paris trading, giving the company a market value of €1.1bn. The company’s shares are up 200 per cent this year.
Ian Read, Pfizer chief executive, is under pressure from shareholders to find an outlet for about $17bn in cash that it has trapped offshore out of reach of the US taxman and to find new drugs to reinvigorate its research and development pipeline.
A takeover of Cellectis would mark Pfizer’s second big move in immuno-oncology in six months after a deal worth up to $2.85bn with Merck of Germany last year to jointly-develop another kind of drug which harnesses the immune system to fight cancer.
The Cellectis treatment involves injecting genetically-engineered chimeric antigen receptors (Cars) into a patient’s blood to help the disease-fighting T-cells recognise a specific protein associated with cancer leading to the destruction of tumour cells.
Several companies, including Novartis of Switzerland and US biotech companies Kite and Juno, are scrambling to develop similar therapies after spectacular results in early clinical trials. However, whereas others involve modifying a patient’s own T-cells, Cellectis is aiming to produce an “off-the-shelf” treatment that would work for anyone. This could mitigate some of the high costs and complexities that are seen as potential obstacles to Car-T therapies.
Some analysts and scientists have warned of a potential investment bubble in Car-T companies after the hundreds of millions of dollars raised by Juno, Kite and Cellectis in IPOs over the past year. Critics have pointed out that, while the treatments look effective in blood cancers, they remain unproven in the much larger market to treat solid tumours.
There are also safety concerns over the high potency of the drugs and the risk of damage to healthy tissue. Cost is another challenge with those Car-T therapies closest to market expected to be priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient.
For Pfizer, a deal with Cellectis would be its second significant acquisition this year after its $17bn acquisition of Hospira, a maker of sterile injectable drugs, in February. There has been persistent speculation that it could also launch another move on a big pharmaceuticals group after its failed bid for AstraZeneca of the UK last year.