Johnson & Johnson is spending $1.25 billion in cash to buy Yellow Jersey Therapeutics, marking its second acquisition in the burgeoning I&I field in as many weeks.
J&J’s deal to buy Yellow Jersey, a wholly owned subsidiary of Swiss biotech Numab Therapeutics, comes 12 days after the company announced plans to acquire Proteologix, a preclinical I&I startup backed by OrbiMed, for $850 million in cash.
With Tuesday’s deal, J&J gains access to a bispecific antibody that is ready for Phase 2 testing in atopic dermatitis. The asset, known as NM26, entered Phase 1 trials a year ago and may eventually be tested in other inflammatory skin diseases, the companies said.
Yellow Jersey is attempting to go after two popular I&I targets — IL-4R alpha subunit and IL-31 — with one medicine. Sanofi and Regeneron’s blockbuster drug Dupixent targets both IL-4 and IL-13. And, on the IL-31 front, Galderma’s nemolizumab candidate is currently awaiting clearance from the FDA and the European Medicines Agency.
Venture capital investors and biopharmas alike are expanding their work in I&I through a series of multibillion-dollar acquisitions and megarounds. Other companies to recently receive venture backing include Attovia Therapeutics, which plans to enter the clinic later this year with its IL-31 biologic ATTO-1310.
Yellow Jersey has said that targeting both IL-4 and IL-31 could give its therapy a leg up in the space by hitting the neuroinflammatory pathway that drives itch.
Numab CEO David Urech told Endpoints News the company believes it’s the first to bring an IL-4/IL-31 bispecific into the clinic. That’s how the company came up with the name of Yellow Jersey. After each stage of the Tour de France, the yellow jersey is given to the overall leading cyclist.
“We will need to develop in multiple indications and extremely fast. And for this we concluded that this is a program that’s more appropriate to partner with a very large and competent big pharma company rather than developing it on our own,” Urech said Tuesday. “That’s how we got in contact with multiple parties. There was strong interest from the outset, and we ended up with J&J, who made a very attractive proposal.”
J&J highlighted NM26’s potential to help patients with intense itching.
“To deliver durable, symptom-free remission for the millions of people living with AD, our medicines need to be tailored to target multiple disease-driving pathways in different patient subpopulations,” David Lee, J&J’s global immunology therapeutic leader, said in a press release.
The deal adds to a particularly impressive streak for Forbion, which invested in Numab’s Series C in 2021. Biopharmas have snatched up six of the Dutch investor’s portfolio companies in the past year, including obesity drugmaker Inversago and asthma biotech Aiolos. Another investor, Novo Holdings, has also had several Swiss startups get acquired in recent years.
Numab’s other investors include HBM, Cormorant Asset Management, BVF Partners, BlackRock, Octagon and RTW. It last disclosed a $110 million Series C in May 2021. The biotech also works with Ono Pharmaceutical in cancer and has disclosed agreements with Eisai, Boehringer Ingelheim, Intarcia, CStone and others.
J&J said it expects the Yellow Jersey deal to close by year’s end, and it will also “enter a separate agreement” with Kaken Pharmaceutical to get rights to NM26 in the Asia-Pacific region. Numab and Kaken in 2021 announced a co-development and regional licensing deal for the asset, giving Kaken commercial rights in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong.