AstraZeneca PLC (LSE:AZN) has agreed to pay up to $1 billion to buy EsoBiotec, a Belgian company that has made clinical breakthroughs in cell therapy, where immune cells are engineered directly within the patient's body.
The FTSE 100 giant will pay $425 million when the deal closes, which is expected before June, plus up to a further $575 million based on development and regulatory milestones.
EsoBiotec's Engineered NanoBody Lentiviral (ENaBL) platform has piqued the interest of the largest listed company in London as it "empowers the immune system to attack cancers and could offer many more patients access to transformative cell therapy treatments delivered in just minutes rather than the current process which takes weeks", it said.
ENaBL enables off-the-shelf treatments that could reduce costs, improve patients' experience, eliminate the need for immune cell depletion and have the potential to improve efficacy and safety, AstraZeneca said.
The Belgian company uses targeted lentiviruses with modifications that can deliver specificity to immune cells, such as T cells, and can evade rapid elimination by the patient's immune system.
"Traditional cell therapies require cells to be removed from a patient, genetically modified outside the body, and then readministered to the patient as a medicine after immune cell depletion, typically taking weeks," AstraZeneca said.
"By engineering immune cells directly within the patients body, the EsoBiotec in vivo approach has the potential to address many of the barriers associated with traditional cell therapies, reducing complexities and manufacturing timelines, thereby increasing access for patients."
The Anglo-Swedish company is already advancing a pipeline of other cell therapies enabled by various technologies, including chimeric antigen receptor T-cells (CAR T), T-cell receptor therapies (TCR T) and CAR T regulatory (CAR Tregs) cells.
Susan Galbraith, AstraZeneca's executive vice president for oncology haematology R&D, said the plan is to rapidly advance EsoBiotec's in-vivo platform.
"We believe it has the potential to transform cell therapy and will enable us to scale these innovative treatments so that many more patients around the world can access them.
"EsoBiotec will accelerate and expand the impact of our recent investments and marks a major step forward in realising our ambition to harness the full potential of cell therapy."