Af­ter swoop­ing in to buy Hep­tares a cou­ple of years ago in a $400 mil­lion deal, So­sei has put a new ac­qui­si­tion play in mo­tion. This morn­ing CEO Pe­ter Bains at So­sei took the first step to­ward a new buy­out, snag­ging 25.6% of the eq­ui­ty of Mi­NA Ther­a­peu­tics and an ex­clu­sive op­tion to ac­quire the com­pa­ny for $45 mil­lion in cash.

Right now Mi­NA is putting its small ac­ti­vat­ing RNA (saR­NA) tech­nol­o­gy to a Phase I/IIa test in liv­er can­cer. If the tri­al works, fol­low­ing an es­tab­lished sched­ule of mile­stones, So­sei can com­plete the deal for an­oth­er $180 mil­lion in cash plus $309 mil­lion more in mile­stones — for a to­tal of $534 mil­lion.

The way Bains ex­plains the deal, So­sei is tak­ing an­oth­er step to­ward cre­at­ing a glob­al com­pa­ny, based in Japan and pur­su­ing biotechs with a glob­al reach of their own.

Robert Habib, Mi­NA CEO

Just af­ter Al­ler­gan and Pfiz­er went their sep­a­rate ways in ear­ly 2016, for ex­am­ple, Al­ler­gan chose to seed an am­bi­tious de­vel­op­ment pact with Hep­tares on new drugs to ad­dress the cog­ni­tive de­cline and be­hav­ioral is­sues as­so­ci­at­ed with Alzheimer’s. Then Hep­tares swooped in to buy GPCR tech in an ac­qui­si­tion of Switzer­land’s G7 ear­li­er this year, which was quick­ly re­ward­ed with a pact from Dai­ichi Sankyo.

Now So­sei wants to take a step-by-step ap­proach to find­ing out if Mi­NA can boost its pipeline with a new slate of its saR­NA ther­a­peu­tics, which adopts a new ap­proach to kick­ing mes­sen­ger RNA in­to ac­tion to cre­ate new drugs — pro­teins — us­ing the body’s cells as a man­u­fac­tur­ing cen­ter. But it’s not just div­ing in all at once. Bains wants to see some da­ta be­fore com­ing back for the whole thing.

Mi­NA brought to­geth­er a group of in­ves­ti­ga­tors like Long-Chen Li, Har­vard’s David Corey and Nagy Habib at Im­pe­r­i­al who have been de­vel­op­ing their RNA tech to trig­ger pro­tein pro­duc­tion to ad­dress spe­cif­ic ail­ments. And their first clin­i­cal en­deav­or for MTL-CEB­PA marks a shot at treat­ment-re­sis­tant liv­er can­cer — an am­bi­tious tar­get.

Mes­sen­ger RNA is a nascent field, but it’s grow­ing fast. Mod­er­na raised a whop­ping $1.9 bil­lion for its work, be­fore see­ing the first snap­shot of hu­man da­ta. Ger­many’s Cure­Vac is al­so hot on the trail.

Says Bains:

We be­lieve MTL-CEB­PA could al­low us to ad­vance our pipeline strat­e­gy with a nov­el clin­i­cal as­set that could be de­vel­oped and ul­ti­mate­ly com­mer­cial­ized by So­sei. We rec­og­nize that this as­set is ear­ly stage and that more ro­bust da­ta will be avail­able in the near term; these con­sid­er­a­tions have in­flu­enced the pru­dent and phased deal struc­ture. We al­so be­lieve that Mi­NA’s RNA ac­ti­va­tion plat­form can be ap­plied to oth­er gene tar­gets, pro­vid­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate a pipeline of in­no­v­a­tive prod­ucts.

The mRNA player Moderna is further cementing its presence on the African continent.

Moderna announced on Thursday that it has finalized an agreement with Kenya’s government to partner up and bring an mRNA manufacturing facility to the east African nation. The new facility aims to manufacture up to 500 million doses of vaccines annually. Moderna also said the new facility will have the ability to spike its production capabilities to respond to public health emergencies on the continent or globally.

ViiV Healthcare has teamed up with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool and three generic manufacturers to expand access to medicine that can prevent HIV.

ViiV and the Medicines Patent Pool jointly announced Thursday that the MPP signed sub-licensing agreements with Aurobindo, Cipla and Viatris to manufacture generics of a long-acting form of cabotegravir for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). As a result of the agreement, the manufacturers will be able to develop, manufacture and supply generic versions of cabotegravir LA in 90 countries — subject to regulatory approvals.