Roche has struck a $1.5 billion deal to buy Poseida Therapeutics. The takeover will establish off-the-shelf cell therapies, which Roche has said can democratize CAR-Ts, as a new core capability at the drugmaker.
Poseida partnered with Roche in 2022, accepting a $110 million upfront in return for licenses on two cell therapy candidates and options on other prospects. The deal, which included $6 billion in milestones, moved Roche deeper into cell therapies. Roche stayed on the sidelines in the early years of excitement about CAR-T but has struck deals to build out a cell therapy presence in recent years.
The Poseida takeover, which was announced alongside a major setback for the Swiss drugmaker’s TIGIT program, marks a step up in Roche’s pursuit of the cell therapy market. Roche has agreed to buy the biotech for $9 a share in cash. A further $4 a share is tied to the achievement of certain milestones. The total equity value of the deal is $1.5 billion.
The outlay will give Roche control of a pipeline of cell therapies and the underlying technology platform. Roche already has licenses to Poseida’s two lead blood cancer programs. The biotech moved a CAR-T cell therapy against BCMA into the clinic in multiple myeloma 2022 and began testing a CD19xCD20 prospect in humans this year. Roche also has an option on Poseida’s CD70-directed acute myeloid leukemia asset.
Buying Poseida will give Roche full ownership of those assets, plus a BCMAxCD19 prospect that Poseida is developing in multiple myeloma and autoimmune diseases and a clutch of solid tumor candidates. The solid tumor work, which includes a collaboration with Astellas, is led by a MUC1-C candidate that moved into the clinic in 2022.
Other companies are aiming cell therapies at the same targets but Roche is betting Poseida’s nonviral platform will set its candidates apart. The platform is designed to generate off-the-shelf CAR-T therapies that are rich in T stem cell memory cells, a long-lived, self-replicating cell type that Poseida identified as a way to improve safety and efficacy.
Charles Fuchs, M.D., global head of oncology and hematology drug development at Genentech and Roche, set out the case for the platform at the company’s Pharma Day event in September. Fuchs said around 20% of patients eligible for CAR-T receive cell therapy. Poseida’s donor-derived healthy stem cell memory T cells could allow Roche to “truly scale CAR-T therapy to a much broader population,” Fuchs said.
The Roche exec also highlighted Poseida's gene editing tools, including “piggyback insertion technology, which allows for the delivery of multiple CARs in a single step with great efficiency and without the need of viral delivery systems.” Another Poseida technology “allows for multiple knock-in and knock-outs” to prevent graft-versus-host and host-versus-graft responses, Fuchs said.
Poseida has struggled to get investors excited about the technology. The biotech went public in 2020 and briefly traded above $15 a share. Since then, Poseida’s share price has fallen more than 80% to close at $2.86 before news of the Roche deal broke.
Investors drove the biotech’s share price up more than 200% in premarket trading. At $9.20, the stock is trading above the upfront offered by Roche but well below the price including success-based payments.