Con­tin­u­ing an R&D re­vamp, Glax­o­SmithK­line hands off its rare dis­ease unit to Or­chard Ther­a­peu­tics

Glax­o­SmithK­line couldn’t find a buy­er for their gene ther­a­py unit, but they did find a tak­er.

GSK said this morn­ing that it has lat­eraled off the group to a ven­ture-backed start­up called Or­chard Ther­a­peu­tics, which in­cludes co-founder An­drea Spezzi in a group of ex-GSK staffers with close ties to Strimvelis, a pi­o­neer­ing gene ther­a­py that was a key part of this deal. Af­ter shop­ping the deal for months, the GSK team end­ed up vir­tu­al­ly giv­ing it away in ex­change large­ly for a chunk of eq­ui­ty — un­der­scor­ing their in­abil­i­ty to cre­ate much val­ue in the ef­fort.

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