Mor­phoSys is part­ner­ing and in­vest­ing in a se­cre­tive ARCH-backed biotech as it con­tin­ues re­or­ga­niz­ing the pipeline fol­low­ing a $1.7 bil­lion June 2021 buy­out of Con­stel­la­tion and sub­se­quent punt­ing of ear­ly-stage as­sets.

The Ger­man com­pa­ny will team up with ARCH’s Hu­man Im­munol­o­gy Bio­sciences, or HI­Bio for short, in a deal for two clin­i­cal pro­grams. Mor­phoSys will re­ceive a 15% eq­ui­ty stake in HI­Bio and net a $15 mil­lion up­front pay­ment, as well as be­come el­i­gi­ble for up to $1 bil­lion in mile­stone pay­ments.

In ex­change, HI­Bio will get li­cens­es for the an­ti-CD38 an­ti­body felzartam­ab and the an­ti-C5aR1 an­ti­body MOR210. HI­Bio will have rights to these com­pounds every­where ex­cept Chi­na, Hong Kong, Tai­wan and Macau, where Mor­phoSys had signed pre­vi­ous li­cens­ing deals with I-Mab. (I-Mab al­so has rights to MOR210 in South Ko­rea).

Tues­day’s deal is Mor­phoSys’ lat­est ef­fort to re­or­ga­nize af­ter it bought out Con­stel­la­tion last June for a ten-fig­ure sum. At the time, Mor­phoSys made no se­cret of its ul­ti­mate prize: pelabre­sib, an ex­per­i­men­tal BET in­hibitor, cur­rent­ly in Phase III in myelofi­bro­sis.

Con­stel­la­tion re­vealed at De­cem­ber 2020’s ASH con­fer­ence that 67% of Phase II pa­tients giv­en pelabre­sib in com­bi­na­tion with Jakafi as a first-line treat­ment saw a re­duc­tion in spleen vol­ume of 35% or greater at 24 weeks. In a state­ment Tues­day, Mor­phoSys CEO Jean-Paul Kress said the deal would al­low the com­pa­ny to fo­cus its re­sources on de­vel­op­ing the pro­gram.

A few months ago, Mor­phoSys made its first move to fun­nel cash to­ward this can­di­date by writ­ing off all oth­er Con­stel­la­tion-re­lat­ed work for $250 mil­lion, save for one oth­er clin­i­cal pro­gram. In tan­dem, the com­pa­ny dis­con­tin­ued its US-based dis­cov­ery work for those Con­stel­la­tion projects and cen­tral­ized all lab ef­forts in Ger­many, ef­fec­tive­ly end­ing its ear­ly pipeline projects.

The write-off al­so helped Mor­phoSys bet­ter com­mer­cial­ize its on­ly ap­proved drug, Mon­ju­vi, the com­pa­ny said at the time. FDA ap­proved Mon­ju­vi, a CD-19-di­rect­ed ther­a­py, for re­frac­to­ry dif­fuse large B-cell lym­phoma in Au­gust 2020.

Travis Mur­doch

HI­Bio, mean­while, has re­mained un­der the se­cre­tive ARCH in­cu­ba­tor um­brel­la with all the mak­ings of an­oth­er big Bob Nelsen project. The com­pa­ny’s web­site does not re­lay much in­fo, but does note its pri­ma­ry fo­cus will be au­toim­mune and in­flam­ma­to­ry dis­eases.

Its co-founder and CEO, Travis Mur­doch, pre­vi­ous­ly worked at Soft­Bank, Third Rock and McK­in­sey while serv­ing on a few com­pa­ny boards such as Zymer­gen, per his LinkedIn page. ARCH man­ag­ing part­ner Paul Berns al­so chairs HI­Bio’s board.

Pfizer has inked a deal to develop a new Covid therapy with Clear Creek Bio — a 10-person biotech out of RA Capital with an office in Cambridge, MA, but one that operates fully remotely.

Paxlovid has become a big moneymaker for Pfizer this year, projecting $22 billion in sales on the year. But the Big Pharma has begun its search for a next-generation Covid antiviral and potential combination therapies as supply of Paxlovid greatly eclipses actual use of the antiviral.

More and more women are driving innovation and taking leadership roles in biotech – as evidenced today in the release of Endpoints News’ list of the top 20 women in the R&D world – but those gains are beginning to extend across pharma sectors.

In pharma manufacturing in the US today, around 46% of all roles are occupied by women, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2021. And according to a Bloomberg report, women’s roles across manufacturing roles had a massive boost after the start of the pandemic.