When Adri­an Raw­cliffe of­fi­cial­ly steps in­to the CEO role at Adap­ti­m­mune in a few days, he will have a new part­ner­ship to ex­e­cute in one of his first ef­forts to shore up some en­thu­si­asm for its T cell ther­a­py pro­grams.

Adri­an Raw­cliffe

In a $312 mil­lion pact, the US-UK hy­brid biotech has en­list­ed Noile-Im­mune for a next-gen­er­a­tion project that will boost Adap­ti­m­mune’s SPEAR T cells with the Japan­ese com­pa­ny’s PRIME plat­form. In ad­di­tion to the re­cep­tors en­gi­neered in­to the T cells, the re­sult­ing prod­uct would be armed with the cy­tokines IL-7 and CCL19.

Noile-Im­mune has been ap­ply­ing their tech­nol­o­gy — in­vent­ed by Ko­ji Tama­da of Ya­m­aguchi Uni­ver­si­ty — to CAR-T cells, pre­vi­ous­ly ink­ing a co-de­vel­op­ment deal with Take­da.

Not on­ly does PRIME make the en­gi­neered cells more po­tent, it may al­so en­hance the abil­i­ty of the pa­tient’s na­tive T cells to fight sol­id tu­mors, ac­cord­ing to Karen Miller, Adap­ti­m­mune’s SVP of pipeline re­search.

Karen Miller

“We re­cent­ly start­ed our Phase 2 tri­al in sar­co­ma called SPEAR­HEAD-1 as well as the SUR­PASS tri­al, our first next-gen­er­a­tion prod­uct clin­i­cal tri­al. We will con­tin­ue to de­vel­op en­hanced prod­ucts with the aim of in­creas­ing the ef­fi­ca­cy and dura­bil­i­ty of an­ti-tu­mor re­spons­es,” she added in a state­ment.

It’s crunch time for Adap­ti­m­mune. Once a dar­ling in the I/O crowd with a bud­ding TCR tech, its sup­port on Wall Street has been wan­ing since its $191 mil­lion pub­lic de­but in 2015, which in turn fol­lowed a high pro­file $350 mil­lion col­lab­o­ra­tion with Glax­o­SmithK­line. The stock opened at $1.47 to­day, a pre­cip­i­tous fall from last fall’s peak of $13.9. As founder James No­ble pass­es the reins to CFO Raw­cliffe — a GSK vet — the theme now is to make things hap­pen.

Adap­ti­m­mune will now work with Noile-Im­mune on pre­clin­i­cal work around a num­ber of tar­gets, with a goal to en­ter the clin­ic by 2021. That will all hap­pen un­der a new CMO and R&D pres­i­dent af­ter Rafael Ama­do hit the ex­it ear­li­er this month.

At last count the com­pa­ny had about $35 mil­lion in cash on hand and $133 mil­lion in liq­uid­i­ty, giv­ing it a run­way that ex­tends in­to the third quar­ter of next year.

So­cial im­age cred­it: Navy Yard

After spending years developing its oral formulation of the corticosteroid budesonide, Sweden’s Calliditas now has its sights set on the primary biliary cholangitis field.

The company will buy out France-based Genkyotex, and it’s willing to bet up to €87 million ($102 million) that Genkyotex’s failed Phase II drug, GKT831, will do better in late-stage trials.

Under the current agreement, Calliditas $CALT will initially pay €20.3 million in cash for 62.7% of Genkyotex (or €2.80 a piece for 7,236,515 shares) in early October, then circle back for the rest of Genkyotex’s shares under the same terms. If nothing changes, the whole buyout will cost Calliditas €32.3 million, plus up to  €55 million in contingent rights.

CanSino began the year with a clear goal to secure a secondary listing on Shanghai’s STAR market. Then something more urgent came along: As a rising vaccine developer on a mission to bring global standard immunizations to China, it heeded the call to make a vaccine to protect against a virus that would paralyze the whole world.

Xuefeng Yu and his team managed to keep doing both.

More than a month after CanSino’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate is authorized for military use in China, the Hong Kong-listed company has made a roaring debut in Shanghai. It fetched $748 million (RMB$5.2 billion) by floating 24.8 million shares, and soared 88% on its first trading day.

After 13 years on Nasdaq, Cellular Biomedicine Group is returning to private hands.

CEO Tony (Bizuo) Liu is a key advocate of the deal, leading a consortium of mostly Chinese investors including other top company execs, Yunfeng Capital and TF Capital — even as the company is getting more entrenched in the US with its CAR-T and other cell therapy work.

Shareholders are receiving $19.75 per share $CBMG, which translates to a premium of 31.4% over the 30 trading-day average price as of August 11. The stock, though, has dropped significantly since the consortium first put in its proposal in November. Compared to then, the acquisition price marks only a 11.8% increase.