News briefing: Merck’s Roger Perlmutter buys his first solid tumor TriNKET from Dragonfly; ViGeneron to expand production of eye gene therapy
A little more than 2 years after Merck’s Roger Perlmutter signed off on a deal that would pay Dragonfly up to $695 million for each drug program it picked off for solid tumors, the pharma giant is stepping up with their first opt-in.
We don’t know exactly how much this deal costs Merck in the upfront, or which immunotherapy they’re getting, but it’s a major step forward for Bill Haney’s Waltham, MA-based biotech, which built its TriNKET technology platform with the help of Tyler Jacks, an MIT professor, HHMI investigator and director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research as well as Berkeley’s David Raulet, whose background as an expert in NK cells and tumor immunology helped spotlight some of the big ideas Dragonfly is pursuing.
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