Gilead’s $4.9 bil­lion buy­out of Forty Sev­en, an­nounced in ear­ly March, land­ed in a dif­fer­ent era be­fore the pan­dem­ic con­sumed bio­phar­ma news. But even amid all the buzz around its po­ten­tial Covid-19 treat­ment remde­sivir, CEO Daniel O’Day is still mak­ing clear that on­col­o­gy is where he wants to take the com­pa­ny.

His lat­est deal is a re­search col­lab­o­ra­tion in­volv­ing a low-pro­file play­er head­quar­tered in Mel­bourne — so stealthy that the up­front pay­ment and to­tal val­ue are all still un­der wraps. What Gilead did re­veal, how­ev­er, is an in­ter­est in oNKo-in­nate’s ex­per­tise in nat­ur­al killer cells as a new fron­tier of im­muno-on­col­o­gy.

William Lee

“We have a strate­gic fo­cus of grow­ing both our ex­per­tise and pipeline in im­muno-on­col­o­gy and we be­lieve this ex­cit­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion will sup­port each of these ob­jec­tives as we work to dis­cov­er and de­vel­op nov­el can­cer ther­a­pies for pa­tients,” William Lee, Gilead’s EVP of re­search, said in a state­ment.

While T cell me­di­at­ed an­ti-tu­mor ac­tiv­i­ty cur­rent­ly dom­i­nates can­cer im­munother­a­py — from CAR-T to PD-(L)1 in­hi­bi­tion — NK cells, a fel­low mem­ber of the lym­pho­cyte class, al­so plays a sur­veil­lance and ef­fec­tor role.

Mul­ti­ple ap­proach­es have emerged to kick them in­to ac­tion: Af­fimed and Drag­on­fly promise to ac­ti­vate and en­gage what’s al­ready in the body, while oth­ers like Cy­tovia and a Take­da-backed group at MD An­der­son are in­ter­est­ed in at­tach­ing re­cep­tors to de­vel­op a CAR-NK ther­a­py. Among those go­ing the en­gi­neer­ing route, there are yet dif­fer­ent ways to man­u­fac­ture NK cells. J&J re­cent­ly bet on Fate Ther­a­peu­tics’ iP­SC-based ap­proach; Nkar­ta re­lies on healthy donors; while Celar­i­ty ex­tracts them from pla­cen­tas.

oNKo-in­nate, mean­while, says it is “modal­i­ty ag­nos­tic.”

The com­pa­ny’s co-founders Jai Rautela and Nicholas Hunt­ing­ton set out in 2016 to look for the whole range of ways NK cells are in­volved in in­nate tu­mor recog­ni­tion, how they move and per­sist in the body, and are neg­a­tive­ly reg­u­lat­ed.

Over three years, oNKo-in­nate will de­ploy its genome-wide screen­ing tech­niques and im­mune cell tar­get dis­cov­ery plat­form in ser­vice of Gilead’s I/O pro­gram and sub­sidiary Kite Phar­ma’s cell ther­a­py work. The for­mer will like­ly yield tar­gets for an­ti­bod­ies or fu­sion pro­teins — of which there are sev­er­al in Gilead’s ear­ly-stage pipeline — while the goal of the lat­ter is to cre­ate and eval­u­ate NK con­structs.

Gilead’s Kite sub­sidiary is run by Christi Shaw — and de­spite a re­cent le­gal set­back, which leaves it on the hook for over a bil­lion dol­lars in IP dam­ages to Juno, the com­pa­ny is hus­tling a sec­ond CAR-T to­ward the FDA and in­tent on de­liv­er­ing more.

On the I/O side, Forty Sev­en marked Gilead’s largest ac­qui­si­tion since they bought Kite for $11.9 bil­lion in 2017, if you leave out the part­ner­ship ex­pan­sion with Gala­pa­gos worth $5 bil­lion. That deal brought in ma­grolimab, a CD47 an­ti­body that came out of Irv Weiss­man and Ravin­dra Ma­jeti’s long­time work on the “don’t eat me” sig­nal. Be­fore that, back in late 2018, Gilead bet $150 mil­lion in cash on Agenus’ plat­form, so far pro­duc­ing one bis­pe­cif­ic mol­e­cule and an­oth­er block­ing CD137.

More deals might yet be on the ta­ble. The lat­est ru­mor cen­ters around Ar­cus, led by biotech vet Ter­ry Rosen and de­vel­op­ing drugs against TIG­IT, CD73 and A2aR/A2bR.

Bot­tom line, as O’Day put it in his first an­a­lyst call of the year: Gilead aims to in­tro­duce 10 new trans­for­ma­tive ther­a­pies in the next 10 years. Bolt-on deals and part­ner­ships will be the way to go.

Discovery Life Sciences has acquired what claims to be the Maryland-based host of the world’s largest hepatocyte inventory, known as IVAL, to help researchers select more effective and safer drug candidates in the future.

The combined companies will now serve a wider range of drug research and development scientists, according to Albert Li, who founded IVAL in 2004 and is set to join the Discovery leadership team as the CSO of pharmacology and toxicology.

Researchers may be nearing an answer for the mysterious and life-threatening blood clots that appeared on very rare occasions in people who received the J&J or AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.

The new work builds on an early hypothesis researchers in Norway put forward last spring, when the cases first cropped up. They proposed the events were similar to blood clots that can occur in a small subset of patients who receive heparin, one of the most commonly used blood thinners.