With first drug on the mar­ket, Ar­cutis forks over $16M cash for a buy­out

Hav­ing scored their first FDA ap­proval, the der­ma­tol­ogy spe­cial­ists at Ar­cutis have pounced on a new buy­out to beef up the pipeline.

Ar­cutis is ac­quir­ing Ducen­tis Bio­Ther­a­peu­tics in a hy­brid deal com­pris­ing $16 mil­lion in cash and rough­ly $14 mil­lion in stock — plus an undis­closed sum of mile­stone pay­ments. Ac­cord­ing to Ducen­tis in­vestor LifeArc, the deal val­ues Ducen­tis at about $400 mil­lion.

The crown jew­el here is Ducen­tis’ lead pre­clin­i­cal com­pound, DS-234, a fu­sion pro­tein and ag­o­nist of the CD200 re­cep­tor, which is be­lieved to be an im­muno­log­i­cal check­point. By dri­ving up the ac­tiv­i­ty of CD200R, Ar­cutis hopes that the drug can sup­press un­want­ed over­ac­tive im­mune re­spons­es, there­by damp­en­ing in­flam­ma­tion in dis­eases like atopic der­mati­tis.

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