Sector News

Categories

Borderless Insights

Image
‘We’ or ‘They’? The Simple Words That Reveal How You Really Feel About Your Company.
Image
The Law of the Magic Third: Your Competitive Advantage
Image
The Skills-Forward Revolution:   Stretching the Boundaries of Professional Flexibility

AstraZeneca would consider buying immune-therapy company: Bloomberg

June 3, 2015
Life sciences
AstraZeneca Plc would consider acquiring a developer of a new type of cancer therapy aimed at supercharging the body’s immune response, Bloomberg quoted Chief Executive Pascal Soriot as saying on Tuesday.
 
An earlier version of the Bloomberg article quoted Soriot as saying that AstraZeneca would consider buying a company such as Juno Therapeutics Inc (JUNO.O).
 
Juno’s shares rose as much as 15.8 percent to $61.50 on the original report before falling back to $58.09 in early afternoon trading, for a rise of 9 percent.
 
The corrected story said Soriot was responding to a question about whether AstraZeneca was interested in making an acquisition in CAR T therapies, such as Juno.
 
“As part of our science-led strategy, we’d consider partnering with or acquiring distinctive technologies that complement our pipeline,” Esra Erkal-Palera, a spokeswoman for AstraZeneca, told Reuters.
 
“Bloomberg is citing our partnership with Juno as an example of the type of science – we don’t speculate about individual companies,” she said in an email.
 
Seattle-based Juno, among the few companies developing a new class of immuno-oncology treatments called CAR-T cell therapies, had a market value of $4.38 billion as of Monday’s close.
 
AstraZeneca and Juno already have a collaboration agreement to test one of AstraZeneca’s cancer drugs in combination with Juno’s CAR-T cell therapy, which is considered to be a breakthrough in cancer treatment.
 
CAR-T therapies, which directly recruit the immune system’s powerful T cells, are proving to be effective against tumors and could soon dominate the $100 billion global market for drugs that fight cancer.
 
AstraZeneca’s shares were up marginally at $67.31 on the New York Stock Exchange after touching a low of $66.68.
 
(Reporting by Amrutha Penumudi in Bengaluru; Editing by Ted Kerr)
comments closed

Related News

July 6, 2025

AbbVie to acquire Capstan Therapeutics for $2 Billion

Life sciences

AbbVie has announced it will acquire Capstan Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on advancing in vivo cell engineering through RNA delivery using targeted lipid nanoparticles (tLNPs). The deal includes Capstan’s lead drug candidate, an in vivo CAR-T therapy for autoimmune diseases that is currently in early-stage clinical trials.

Read more
July 6, 2025

Modella AI and AstraZeneca link for cancer clinical development

Life sciences

Modella AI has signed a multi-year agreement with AstraZeneca to expedite AI-driven oncology clinical development. The agreement will enable the use of Modella AI’s latest models, with rich feature extraction from different types of data, to speed up clinical development across AstraZeneca’s worldwide oncology portfolio.

Read more
July 6, 2025

Merck concludes SpringWorks acquisition for $3.4bn

Life sciences

Merck KGaA has concluded the previously announced acquisition of SpringWorks Therapeutics for an enterprise value of €3bn ($3.4bn), after receiving regulatory approvals and fulfilling customary closing conditions. Merck will add two SpringWorks’ products targeting rare tumours with limited treatment options.

Read more
More news

How can we help you?

We're easy to reach