Covington & Burling And Cooley Guide AstraZeneca And EsoBiotec On Acquisition Of Cancer Treatment Company
Covington & Burling And Cooley Guide AstraZeneca And EsoBiotec On Acquisition Of Cancer Treatment Company
The deal includes an initial payment of $425m at closing and up to $575m later
Covington & Burling and Cooley are assisting AstraZeneca and EsoBiotec, respectively, on a $1bn acquisition of the Belgian cancer treatment company, EsoBiotec.
The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2025. EsoBiotec will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of AstraZeneca.
The deal includes an initial payment of $425m at closing and up to $575m more depending on EsoBiotec’s development and regulatory milestones.
EsoBiotec is a small enterprise. It is working on a type of cheaper and quicker cancer treatment CAR-T cell therapy.
The treatment, which currently uses a patient's immune system to recognize and destroy cancer, requires T-cells to be harvested and modified outside the body and reinfused weeks later.
It can cost up to £400,000 per patient.
The firm intends to make the therapy an off-the-shelf product. It can be administered with a simple injection by engineering immune cells directly in the patient's body. The treatment targets viruses, delivering genetic instructions to specific immune cells such as T-cells, programmed to recognize and destroy cancerous cells.
Susan Galbraith, the executive vice-president of oncology research and development at AstraZeneca said that the company negotiated the deal after observing EsoBiotec’s data recently. It was about the first patient at JP Morgan’s healthcare conference in San Francisco.
She stated, “We believe it has the potential to transform cell therapy and will enable us to scale these innovative treatments.”
Meanwhile, AstraZeneca is the largest company listed on the London Stock Exchange, with a market capitalization of $185 billion.
The Cooley team was led by London partners Russell Anderson (M&A) and Simon Amies (life sciences), and San Diego partners Rama Padmanabhan (M&A), Rowook Park (M&A) and Charity Williams (licensing transactions).
