Cellectis gets another bailout

Until a year ago AstraZeneca had no visible presence in Car-T, but today’s deal with Cellectis sets the stage for up to 10 new cell and gene therapy projects to enter its pipeline. Cellectis gets $25m up front plus an $80m equity investment at a $364m valuation, and could receive more in future.

These terms might look like chickenfeed, but they’re highly significant for Cellectis, whose market cap had slumped to $53m despite some $86m of mid-year cash, and which had given few clinical updates so far this year. Pfizer and – indirectly – Allogene had earlier rescued Cellectis, and now Astra has come in with a fresh bailout for the French biotech.

An obvious question given Cellectis’s depressed valuation is why Astra didn’t simply buy the company out. Not only is the equity placement being done at many times Cellectis’s valuation, Astra is provisionally agreeing to take its Cellectis stake up to 44% through a future $140m investment in convertible preferred shares, not to mention the prospect of milestone payments.

Car-T?

After making significant advances in oncology over the past 10 years AstraZeneca was notable for lacking an obvious presence in cell therapy, and it was only in the past 12 months that it disclosed its first Car-T projects: AZD0754 and AZD5851 are dnTGFbRII-armoured constructs against Steap2 and GPC3 respectively, while a third unnamed Astra Car hits Claudin18.2.

Interestingly, however, Astra’s Cellectis deal isn’t specifically focused on Car-T. Rather, it’s broadly said to involve novel cell and gene therapy candidates, with autoimmune diseases cited in addition to oncology. 25 “genetic targets” have exclusively been reserved for Astra, Cellectis said, and the big pharma group can select up to 10 of these for further development.

Pfizer buy-in

It was back in 2014, at the dawn of the Car-T revolution, that Cellectis – then a little-known crop protection company – got its first big buy-in, from Pfizer. This involved Cellectis’s Talen meganuclease technology, which Pfizer would use to develop allogeneic Car-T therapies against 15 targets.

Pfizer later added to this deal the US rights to Cellectis’s lead asset, UCART19, which had been licensed to Servier. However, in contrast to autologous Car-T therapies, the first of which were approved in 2017, work proceeded very slowly on allogeneics, and by 2018 Pfizer had had enough, washing its hands of the Cellectis work.

But Cellectis found a fresh white knight in the shape of Allogene, which agreed to take over the rights that had been held by Pfizer. Though Cellectis received no cash from Allogene that company provided a key lifeline; had Allogene not been willing to take on this work, the exit of Pfizer would have left Cellectis in serious difficulties.

Those difficulties have come, in the shape of a share price collapse exacerbated by past two years’ biotech bear market. But, for the third time, Cellectis has found a company willing to come to its aid.

The ups and downs of Cellectis

Note: the clinical-stage assets UCART22, UCART123 & UCART20x22 remain under Cellectis’s ownership. Source: SEC filings & company statements.