SAN FRANCISCO – GSK will pay $1 billion upfront to buy clinical-stage asthma drugmaker Aiolos Bio, the British drugmaker said early Tuesday morning. It could pay up to $400 million more if milestones are met.

The deal marks one of the quickest startup unveiling-to-buyout journeys in recent biotech memory. The San Francisco and London biotech emerged just three months ago with one of 2023’s largest private financing rounds at $245 million. Atlas Venture, Bain Capital Life Sciences, Forbion, Sofinnova Investments and RA Capital Management backed the Series A.

It also marks the fourth acquisition unveiled during the annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, where dealmaking is front and center. Johnson & Johnson splashed $2 billion on ADCs, Merck bought a T cell engager player and Novartis made a small play for an autoimmune startup. Novartis is also reportedly in talks to buy cardio drugmaker Cytokinetics, per Wall Street Journal.

Aiolos is looking to go up against Amgen and AstraZeneca’s monthly injectable Tezspire with its every-six-month anti-TSLP antibody known as AIO-001. The antibody is “ready to enter Phase II,” GSK said in its press release.

GSK is swooping in on a biotech that would likely face competition from others in clinical development, including Sanofi, Upstream Bio and the earlier-stage Generate:Biomedicines. Boston-area Upstream raised $200 million in the first half of 2023 to go through Phase II trials and prepare for late-stage studies of its ex-Astellas monoclonal antibody. It had runway into 2026, CEO Samantha Truex told Endpoints News at the time of the financing disclosure.

Like Upstream, Aiolos’ candidate comes from elsewhere. The biotech paid $21.5 million upfront and promised more than $1 billion in potential milestones to Chinese pharma company Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals for rights outside of Greater China last year.

The startup was founded by CEO Khurem Farooq and Anthony Adamis. They had worked together at Genentech on immunology and ophthalmology programs. Farooq had run Gyroscope Therapeutics, an ophthalmology gene therapy biotech bought by Novartis for $800 million upfront in late 2021. The Swiss Big Pharma discontinued the lead program from the buyout for geographic atrophy last fall.

“We have a proud heritage and deep development expertise in respiratory medicines, especially addressing diseases driven by IL-5 with high levels of eosinophils or high T2 inflammation,” GSK chief scientist Tony Wood said in a statement.

“Adding AIO-001, a potentially best-in-class medicine targeting the TSLP pathway, could expand the reach of our current respiratory biologics portfolio, including to the 40% of severe asthma patients with low T2 inflammation where treatment options are still needed,” the CSO added.

GSK, unlike some of its Big Pharma peers, has been relatively quiet on the M&A front lately. It bought chronic cough biotech Bellus Health for $2 billion in April last year.

Publication: The Wall Street Journal

Author: Christian Moess Laursen

Link: GSK Expands Respiratory Pipeline With Aiolos Bio Buy - WSJ