Look­ing past Big Phar­ma ri­vals, Blue­print buys a pre­clin­i­cal biotech for $250M+

J&J’s Ry­bre­vant scored the first ap­proval back in May for a small group of lung can­cer pa­tients with a rare EGFR mu­ta­tion. De­spite a swarm of oth­er bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies an­gling for a piece of that mar­ket, Blue­print Med­i­cines is bet­ting near­ly $500 mil­lion on a can­di­date it thinks will stand out.

Blue­print is putting down $250 mil­lion in cash and an­oth­er $215 mil­lion in biobucks for Lengo Ther­a­peu­tics and its pre­clin­i­cal non-small cell lung can­cer pro­gram LNG-451. Though it hasn’t been test­ed in hu­mans, Blue­print says the can­di­date was “high­ly brain-pen­e­trant” in pre­clin­i­cal tri­als, and has the po­ten­tial to in­hib­it all com­mon EGFR ex­on 20 in­ser­tion vari­ants — which are found in just 2% to 3% of NSCLC pa­tients.

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