Merck partners up on T-cell tech platform in $374M autoimmune deal; Turnstone taps BMS vet Mike Burgess for top R&D role
→ Back at the beginning of the year, the team at Cue Biopharma brought its A round up to $26 million after building a platform tech that revolves around its work orchestrating T cell responses. Anyone familiar with the field will recognize an important strategy here that involves amping up an immune response (cancer, for one) or dismantling it (autoimmune diseases). Today, giant Merck — which has an R&D team that is built to progress its PD-1 drug Keytruda — has chosen to partner up with the new-wave Cambridge, MA company. Interestingly, Merck’s interest is on the autoimmune side of things. We have no idea what the upfront is — Merck likes to be quiet about the cash it spends — but R&D chief Roger Perlmutter has engineered a string of small licensing deals and acquisitions to augment their pipeline operations. The milestones total up to $374 million. This is all we hear about the focus: “The multi-year collaboration will encompass multiple disease targets across certain primary disease indication areas.” Now you know.
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