Vor, with new CEO, changes course to target autoimmune disease
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Vor Biopharma is licensing rights to an immune disease drug from Chinese biotechnology company RemeGen, it said Wednesday, a little over one month after announcing plans to review strategic alternatives.
As part of its shift in focus, Vor also announced it appointed former MorphoSys leader Jean-Paul Kress as CEO. Vor's previous chief executive Robert Ang will stay on as an adviser through October.
Vor also raised $175 million in a PIPE, or private investment in public equity, that involved half a dozen investors including RA Capital Management, Forbion and Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners.
PureTech Health and the oncologist and author Siddhartha Mukherjee founded Vor nearly a decade ago. Progress developing a treatment for leukemia led the company in 2021 to price a $177 million initial public offering.
But a rocky few years forced Vor to change direction. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech had been advancing cell therapies called trem-cel and VCAR33, but in May revealed plans to wind down clinical operations and lay off 95% of its employees.
Now, Vor is reestablishing itself as an autoimmune disease company. The deal with RemeGen gives its rights to develop and commercialize in most parts of the world a drug for generalized myasthenia gravis, systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis that's already approved in China.
Vor is paying RemeGene $45 million upfront along with $80 million in warrants to purchase common stock in exchange for the drug, called telitacicept.
Telitacicept is in Phase 3 testing for generalized myasthenia gravis in the U.S., Europe and South America, according to the companies. Data from that trial is expected in 2027.
'I am absolutely thrilled to be leading Vor Bio as we transform the company to become a major player in autoimmune disease treatment,' Kress said in a statement.
Telitacicept's targets are cytokines known as BAFF and APRIL, which have also been the focus of other dealmaking.
Recently, China-based biotechs like RemeGen are providing more and more of the drug candidates licensed by U.S. and European drugmakers. 'Global biopharma companies can increasingly look to China as a cost-effective source of innovation, particularly for validated targets and rapid generation of proof-of-concept data,' Leerink Partners analyst David Risinger wrote in a Thursday note to clients.
Vor's decision to start anew with a Phase 3-ready drug candidate contrasts with the route preferred by some activist investors and analysts, who have pushed struggling biotechs to wind down and return cash to shareholders rather than try to reinvent themselves. Some, like Third Harmonic Bio and iTeos Therapeutics, have taken this course, while others have resisted the pressure
'I couldn't be more thrilled with this exciting new direction for Vor, and new leadership with the background and skills appropriate for this asset,' Ang, Vor's former CEO, wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Shares in Vor nearly doubled on the news to trade around $1 apiece by Thursday afternoon.
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