Ra­maswamy's Ax­o­vant whips up a CNS spin­off with a $530M deal and a syn­di­cate of sup­port­ers

Af­ter beef­ing up its ar­se­nal of gene ther­a­pies-in-de­vel­op­ment in De­cem­ber fol­low­ing the strik­ing fail­ures of its once-hyped de­men­tia and Alzheimer’s as­sets, Vivek Ra­maswamy’s Ax­o­vant has now shaped it­self in­to a full-fledged gene ther­a­py com­pa­ny by tran­si­tion­ing its small mol­e­cule team in­to a new CNS en­ti­ty — Switzer­land-based Arvelle Ther­a­peu­tics.

Arvelle has paid South Ko­rea’s SK Bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals $100 mil­lion up­front for the Eu­ro­pean rights to an antiepilep­tic drug, cenoba­mate, which is cur­rent­ly un­der FDA re­view. SK is el­i­gi­ble to re­ceive up to $430 mil­lion in reg­u­la­to­ry and com­mer­cial mile­stones, and roy­al­ties on net sales gen­er­at­ed in Eu­rope. Arvelle plans to file an ap­pli­ca­tion to mar­ket the drug in Eu­rope based on the da­ta gen­er­at­ed from SK’s glob­al clin­i­cal tri­al pro­gram.

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