Re­genxBio’s jour­ney as a drug de­vel­op­er may have been less than rosy, but there’s been lit­tle doubt about the val­ue of the gene ther­a­py tech­nol­o­gy it ob­tained from Jim Wil­son’s labs.

Health­care Roy­al­ty Man­age­ment has made that clear once again, strik­ing a deal to buy a por­tion of its roy­al­ties on Zol­gens­ma for $200 mil­lion.

Ac­cord­ing to the lat­est quar­ter­ly fil­ing from Re­genxBio, it’s re­ceived $40.7 mil­lion in roy­al­ties in the first nine months of 2020, com­pared to just over $10 mil­lion in the same pe­ri­od in 2019.

Ken Mills

“This agree­ment with HCR pro­vides us with sig­nif­i­cant ad­di­tion­al non-di­lu­tive fund­ing to con­tin­ue our mo­men­tum in the clin­ic fo­cused on RGX-314 and our rare neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­ease plat­form, in­clud­ing RGX-121, as well as the op­por­tu­ni­ty to de­vel­op new in­no­va­tions for pa­tients in oth­er dis­ease ar­eas,” said Ken­neth Mills, Re­genxBio pres­i­dent and CEO, in a state­ment.

It’s a crit­i­cal mo­ment for the com­pa­ny as its pipeline re­bounds from a cou­ple of reg­u­la­to­ry and clin­i­cal set­backs in­to late-stage de­vel­op­ment. There are al­so plans to build new in-house man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties with a 2,000-liter scale to se­cure a sus­pen­sion cell cul­ture process ready for com­mer­cial roll­out.

No­tably, there is a chance that Re­genxBio can get the roy­al­ty rights back if one of two caps the par­ties agreed up­on is met: Ei­ther HCR gets from No­var­tis $260 mil­lion by No­vem­ber 7, 2024, or $320 mil­lion there­after.

A sup­posed once-and-done treat­ment for spinal mus­cu­lar at­ro­phy, Zol­gens­ma has a list price of $2.1 mil­lion. While that has earned it the du­bi­ous ti­tle of the most ex­pen­sive drug in the world, No­var­tis has em­pha­sized that pay­ment is spread out over five years — mean­ing $425,000 a year — and that it’s a life­sav­ing, life-chang­ing ther­a­py for pa­tients who faced a de­press­ing prog­no­sis.

AveX­is, which No­var­tis snapped up for $8.7 bil­lion, de­vel­oped the pro­gram on Re­genxbio’s NAV tech plat­form and AAV9 vec­tor.

The 2018 ac­qui­si­tion im­me­di­ate­ly added $140 mil­lion to Re­genxbio’s vault. Short­ly af­ter­ward, the phar­ma gi­ant forked over an­oth­er $60 mil­lion in an­nu­al fees and $40 mil­lion for a com­mer­cial mile­stone — plus $80 mil­lion more that was paid ear­li­er this year.

Zol­gens­ma is cur­rent­ly ap­proved in the US, Japan, Eu­rope, Brazil and Cana­da, al­beit on­ly for younger chil­dren (in­fants be­low the age of 2 in the US). De­spite some hic­cups, No­var­tis is al­so con­duct­ing tri­als for old­er SMA pa­tients.

Six months after launching his first biotech SPAC, Foresite’s Jim Tananbaum has started a second. On Tuesday, the longtime life science investor filed to raise $100 million by selling 10 million shares of the blank check company FS development II.

It’s a quick return to Wall Street for Foresite, although other firms have moved quicker. Perceptive Advisors raised a $130 million SPAC in June and were back before the end of July to raise another $125 million. By that point, the firm was evidently nearing a deal for the June SPAC, which would announce a half-billion-dollar merger with Cerevel Therapeutics on July 30.

Hours before President Biden’s Covid-19 team gave their first virtual press conference, the famed AIDS researcher David Ho delivered concerning news in a new pre-print: SARS-CoV-2 B.1.351, the variant that emerged in South Africa, is “markedly more resistant” to antibodies from convalescent plasma and vaccinated individuals.

The news for several monoclonal antibodies, including Eli Lilly’s bamlanivimab, was even worse: Their ability to neutralize was “completely or markedly abolished,” Ho wrote. Lilly’s antibody cocktail, which was just shown to dramatically reduce the risk of hospitalizations or death, also became far less potent.