Feb 9 (Reuters) - Eli Lilly will buy Orna Therapeutics for up to $2.4 billion in cash, gaining access to a technology that allows patients' own cells to generate therapies inside the body, without the need to extract them.
The deal, announced on Monday, is the latest in the flurry of transactions signed by the U.S. drugmaker over the last few months in an effort to diversify beyond obesity.
Orna's lead drug candidate, ORN-252, is designed to treat B Cell-driven autoimmune diseases and is in early stages
of development.
It is a type of treatment called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell, or CAR-T, targeting cells with a receptor called CD19.
CAR-T treatment is a type of immunotherapy that modifies a patient's immune cells to recognize a specific target and destroy cancer cells.
Drugmakers such as Bristol Myers Squibb, Gilead and Johnson & Johnson already offer therapies to treat cancer, but those involve isolating the cells, altering and infusing them back into the patients' bodies.
Orna aims to produce the cell "in vivo" or in the body with therapies that use a form of RNA called circular RNA, along with novel lipid nanoparticles.
"Early autologous CAR-T studies have shown the promise of cell therapy for patients with autoimmune diseases, but the complexity, cost and logistics of ex-vivo approaches make it challenging to deliver these breakthroughs to the broader population of patients who need them," said Lilly's Francisco Ramirez-Valle.
Lilly's deal with Orna features an upfront sum and subsequent payments upon achieving certain clinical development milestones.
The U.S. drugmaker, which is dominating the competitive obesity market, has been diversifying beyond its blockbuster weight-loss drugs into other therapeutic areas such as inflammatory bowel disease, cancer, eye disorders and gene-editing technologies through acquisitions and partnerships.
Lilly struck a deal with China's Innovent Biologics this month to develop immunology and oncology drugs. It would pay $350 million upfront and as much as $8.5 billion more if milestones are met.
(Reporting by Sriparna Roy and Padmanabhan Ananthan in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
