Astel­las wa­gers $425M-plus to buy a shot at hatch­ing a 'neur­al dust' break­through in bio­elec­tron­ics

Over the past 2 years Astel­las has been mov­ing clos­er and clos­er to a Berke­ley start­up called io­ta Bio­sciences. First they in­vest­ed in the de­vel­op­er of ul­tra-tiny, dust sized im­plantable med­ical de­vices in 2018. Then they part­nered a year ago.

And to­day they’ve moved in to buy the whole thing.

Astel­las is pay­ing $127.5 mil­lion to buy up all the eq­ui­ty in the up­start it doesn’t al­ready own. There’s $176.5 mil­lion more to cov­er mile­stone goals. And to prove its de­vo­tion to the tech­nol­o­gy, the Japan­ese play­er is com­mit­ting an ad­di­tion­al $125 mil­lion to achieve those goals over the next 5 years.

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