In an attempt to continue its I&I dominance beyond Humira, Skyrizi and Rinvoq, AbbVie is buying up another small autoimmune startup.
The Chicago-area pharma giant is dishing out $200 million upfront in cash to snag Nimble Therapeutics and its preclinical pipeline of oral peptide candidates. Nimble
spun out
of Roche in 2019.
The pharma bought early-stage I&I biotech
Celsius for $250 million
in cash over the summer and IBD drug developer
Landos for $137.5 million
upfront in the spring. Outside of I&I, it also acquired neuro startup
Aliada
this fall for $1.4 billion.
Madison, WI, and Philadelphia-based Nimble has a pipeline of experimental oral medicines for psoriasis and “several autoimmune diseases” that AbbVie didn’t disclose. AbbVie highlighted an IL23R inhibitor in its press release, but Nimble’s website also shows an oral C5 inhibitor for generalized myasthenia gravis and an oral TL1A inhibitor for IBD. AbbVie
licensed
a TL1A antibody earlier this year from FutureGen Biopharmaceutical.
Nimble was founded in 2019, according to its LinkedIn page, and was backed by Telegraph Hill Partners and Roche Ventures. It carried forth a chemical synthesis platform developed at Roche.
The deal follows a trend of large pharmas buying up small, private biotechs with early-stage pipelines this year.
Nimble can also get interim funding payments and shareholders are eligible to get a potential development milestone payment, AbbVie said.
