Cellular Biomedicine draws a line under its past

Two recent big pharma deals and a name change from Cellular Biomedicine Group to AbelZeta Pharma could mark a turnaround for this Chinese company’s fortunes. The group had once made a bold bid to enter China’s Car-T market, listing its shares on Nasdaq, but in 2021 it went private and entered a relative obscurity from which it has only recently emerged.

Yesterday’s China-focused licensing deal with Johnson & Johnson came after an ex-China tie-up in May that saw J&J inject $245m of up-front cash in return for two low-profile clinical-stage Car-T projects. And last week brought news of a separate Car-T tie-up with AstraZeneca, both deals coming five years after a manufacturing collaboration with Novartis.

The terms of neither the Astra deal nor the J&J expansion have been disclosed. However, the initial transaction with J&J was by far the most lucrative to date for AbelZeta, and through it J&J gained ex-China rights to C-CAR066 and prizloncabtagene autoleucel, autologous Car-T therapies for lymphoma that target CD20, and CD20 x CD19, respectively.

The latter featured at the ASH conference on Monday, showing a 93% ORR in relapsed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, with 10 of 47 patients in complete remission at 36 months or longer. The idea is that hitting CD20 as well as CD19 might avoid relapse by way of CD19 antigen escape. However, there was one death, due to pneumonia, that was deemed partly related to prizlon-cel.

Yesterday AbelZeta said J&J was sufficiently satisfied to extend this alliance to add China rights to these same two assets.

The Astra deal, meanwhile, concerns a TGFβRIIDN-armoured Car-T project against GPC3 coded C-CAR031, to which the UK company has obtained Chinese co-development rights in liver cancer. Curiously, C-CAR031 uses the same construct as Astra’s own AZD5851, which Astra is developing outside China, and to which AbelZeta has obtained a milestone and royalty interest in a cross-licensing arrangement.

AbelZeta, formerly known as Cellular Biomedicine Group

Source: company filings.

AbelZeta, then known as CBMG, had burst onto the cell therapy scene in 2015 when it bought rights to Chinese PLA General Hospital’s Car-T assets, making an instant bid to become a major local cell therapy player. Among the assets were Cars against CD19 and CD20, projects that likely comprise the basis of the work now licensed to J&J.

It made other small acquisitions, and did deals with the US NCI and Novartis, becoming the latter’s China manufacturer for Kymriah as well as giving the Swiss firm undisclosed technology rights. However, many of these efforts no longer appear in AbelZeta’s pipeline, which appears to comprise in-house Car-T work as well as a TIL project.

In August 2020 CBMG’s management took the group private at a valuation of around $385m, with cash secured from several funds, and little was heard from the company between then and May’s J&J deal. That tie-up marked AbelZeta’s first serious cash injection since a $120m series A round closed in September 2021.

The cash that has come into the business in the past two years or so is in line with its take-private valuation, so it will be interesting to see what valuation AbelZeta might attract at IPO if it pursues a public path again.