Big pharma Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) has agreed to acquire RNA biotech Orbital Therapeutics for $1.5 Billion.
BMS already owns two approved ex vivo, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies, Breyanzi and Abecma, for treatment of blood cancers, but wants to expand its cell therapy pipeline.
The CAR T cell therapy field is advancing, and there is much interest in the potential of in vivo CAR T cell therapies, which involve treatments that prompt the patients’ bodies to produce modified T cells to fight their disease rather than the T cells being removed from the body, modified in a lab and reinserted, as with ex vivo therapies.
Orbital was founded in 2022 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has a focus on developing both circular and linear RNA therapeutics that can reprogram cells in vivo.
One of the key attractions of Orbital for BMS was that they are developing OTX-201, a pre-clinical, in vivo CAR T-cell therapy designed to reprogram cells that has the potential to treat B cell-driven autoimmune disease.
