Back in April, Black­stone an­nounced a mas­sive, multi­bil­lion dol­lar in­vest­ment in Al­ny­lam Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, but not all the R&D de­tails were fi­nal­ized. On Mon­day, we got a glimpse at how some of those de­tails end­ed up look­ing.

The new­ly-ce­ment­ed R&D agree­ment calls for $150 mil­lion to be paid to Al­ny­lam for the de­vel­op­ment of two pipeline prod­ucts, vutrisir­an and ALN-AGT. $70 mil­lion will go to­ward sup­port­ing Phase III vutrisir­an tri­als in AT­TR amy­loi­do­sis-re­lat­ed car­diomy­opa­thy, while the oth­er $80 mil­lion will ad­vance Phase II and III stud­ies for ALN-AGT in hy­per­ten­sion ther­a­py.

Mon­day’s cash is part of the $2 bil­lion fund­ing Black­stone Life Sci­ences doled out to Al­ny­lam’s RNAi ma­chin­ery a few months ago. The deal was ul­ti­mate­ly struc­tured in four parts: $1 bil­lion for roy­al­ties on in­clisir­an, up to $750 mil­lion in loans and $100 mil­lion in eq­ui­ty in­vest­ment, in ad­di­tion to Mon­day’s $150 mil­lion for the R&D fund.

Yvonne Green­street

Al­ny­lam COO Yvonne Green­street al­so said at the time Black­stone will re­ceive de­vel­op­ment and reg­u­la­to­ry mile­stones over 2 to 4 years on both pro­grams and a 1% roy­al­ty on world­wide vutrisir­an sales.

In­clisir­an is cur­rent­ly un­der re­view by the FDA and ex­pect­ed to be ap­proved at some point this year. The drug works sim­i­lar­ly to PC­SK9 in­hibitors pa­tients cur­rent­ly take to treat high cho­les­terol, but rather than block the pro­tein, it us­es RNA in­ter­fer­ence to pre­vent the body from pro­duc­ing it. Cortel­lis an­a­lysts have pre­dict­ed peak sales to reach $1.16 bil­lion.

Short­ly af­ter the April deal was dis­closed, vutrisir­an al­so re­ceived fast track des­ig­na­tion from the FDA in a sep­a­rate in­di­ca­tion — polyneu­ropa­thy of hAT­TR amy­loi­do­sis. At the time, Black­stone hint­ed it would help sup­port those tri­als but not re­ceive roy­al­ties. Phase III re­sults for this study are ex­pect­ed in ear­ly 2021.

Black­stone’s in­vest­ment comes as part of the largest-ever life sci­ences fund, in which it raised a to­tal of $4.6 bil­lion. The deal with Al­ny­lam makes up the biggest chunk of that fund. Ex-Sanofi CEO Olivi­er Brandi­court, who now works as a se­nior ad­vi­sor at Black­stone, joined Al­ny­lam’s board in Feb­ru­ary but the in­vest­ment firm said at the time he wasn’t in­volved in the trans­ac­tion.

Sanofi and Al­ny­lam had worked to­geth­er pre­vi­ous­ly, but they cut off ties in May 2019. The two broke it off as Al­ny­lam built on an ex­ist­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion with Re­gen­eron, net­ting Al­ny­lam $1 bil­lion-plus. Re­gen­eron ac­quired an ex­clu­sive re­la­tion­ship with Al­ny­lam on treat­ments for eye and CNS dis­eases, while Al­ny­lam got ac­cess to Re­gen­eron’s ge­net­ics re­search.

Thus far, Black­stone has al­so com­mit­ted $350 mil­lion to Rea­ta on its late-stage work for Al­port syn­drome treat­ment, and an­oth­er $337 mil­lion to Medtron­ic for di­a­betes R&D.

Fenlai Tan still gets chills thinking about the darkest day of his life.

Three out of eight lung cancer patients who received a tyrosine kinase inhibitor developed by his company, Betta Pharma, died in the span of a month. Tan, the chief medical officer, was summoned to Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where the head of the clinical trial department told him that the trial investigators would be conducting an autopsy to see if the patients had died of the disease — they were all very sick by the time they enrolled — or of interstitial lung disease, a deadly side effect tied to the TKI class that’s been reported in Japan.

BioNTech’s first mRNA-based vaccine site in Africa will call Rwanda home, and construction is set to start in mid-2022, the company announced Tuesday at a public health forum.

The German company signed a memorandum of understanding, after a meeting between Rwanda’s Minister of Health, Daniel Ngamije, Senegal’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Aïssata Tall Sall, and senior BioNTech officials. Construction plans have been finalized, and assets have been ordered. The agreement will help bring end-to-end manufacturing to Africa, and as many as several hundred million doses of vaccines per year, though initial production will be more modest.