Astel­las spot­lights PFS, OS win for CLDN18.2 — six years af­ter buy­ing BioN­Tech founder­s' oth­er com­pa­ny for $1.4B

Be­fore Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türe­ci be­came known as the cou­ple be­hind one of the world’s first Covid-19 vac­cines — be­fore they even found­ed BioN­Tech — they dis­cov­ered a new pan-can­cer tar­get: iso­form 2 of the tight junc­tion mol­e­cule claudin-18, or CLDN18.2.

Ganymed, a Ger­man biotech they found­ed to­geth­er, de­vel­oped an an­ti­body named zol­be­tux­imab to go af­ter that tar­get and col­lect­ed im­pres­sive mid-stage da­ta in gas­tric can­cer be­fore Astel­las came along in 2016 to buy out Ganymed in a $1.4 bil­lion deal.

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