AbbVie
said
Monday it will pay $1.4 billion in cash to buy a
Phase 1
Alzheimer’s and neuroscience biotech, extending the company’s reach into CNS R&D and marking its third acquisition of the year.
Buying Aliada Therapeutics adds to AbbVie’s big bet on CNS medicines after spending
$8.7 billion last year
to acquire Cerevel Therapeutics. The Chicago area pharma’s CNS pipeline already includes late-stage Parkinson’s programs, three Phase 2 Alzheimer’s drugs and other experimental medicines for major depressive disorder, schizophrenia and epilepsy.
Boston-based Aliada is developing a platform licensed from Johnson & Johnson that helps drugs cross the blood-brain barrier to get at the root of central nervous system diseases. In a news release, Aliada chief medical officer Michael Ryan said “many promising CNS-targeted therapies fail to reach late-stage trials due to their inability to cross the blood-brain barrier.”
The company’s lead drug, ALIA-1758, is in Phase 1 testing for Alzheimer’s. The study is investigating intravenous (or under-the-skin) doses of the anti-pyroglutamate amyloid beta antibody. Three amyloid-targeting Alzheimer’s drugs — from Eisai/Biogen and Eli Lilly — have been approved in the past few years.
Neuroscience has become a fixture for AbbVie alongside immunology as Humira battles biosimilar competition. Company executives previously flagged room for growth in the CNS treatment landscape.
“If you look at migraine, unipolar depression, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, all these other states that we’d be interested in, there’s still a tremendous amount of room to gain efficacy to get to a cure-like level,” AbbVie chief scientific officer Roopal Thakkar said in January at the JPM Healthcare Conference, according to an AlphaSense transcript. “A huge unmet need still exists.”
According to an SEC
filing
, Aliada raised about $32 million in seed funding from J&J, RA Capital, Sanofi Ventures and OrbiMed. The company was led by CEO Adam Rosenberg from its founding in 2021 until February of this year and was co-founded by former J&J leader Sanjaya Singh, who’s a scientific advisor to the company and now CSO of
Third Arc Bio
. It previously inked a deal around lysosomal storage disorder medicines with Chiesi Global Rare Diseases.
The companies anticipate the deal will close before the end of the year. AbbVie also bought I&I biotechs
Celsius
and
Landos Biopharma
earlier this year.
It also marks yet another M&A deal in which a large pharma has bought a nimble, privately-held biotech for $2 billion or less, extending a streak of small tuck-in deals. There have been more than 15 such deals this year, according to an
Endpoints News
tally.