CAR-T company Juno Therapeutics (Seattle, USA) is trading €52.5 million ($59 million) in cash and about $22 million of its own shares for Stage Cell Therapeutics, a German company devoted to the engineering and manufacturing of cell therapies. Juno's top candidates are so-called CAR-T treatments, crafted by removing a patients' own T cells and rewiring them to home in on cancers.
Under the deal, Juno gets Stage Cell's two operations in Munich and Göttingen, staffed by 23 scientists, engineers and other personnel. Juno plans to operate the company as a German subsidiary, promising Stage Cell's shareholders another €135 million ($152 million) tied to development and commercialization milestones.
The complexity of engineering cell therapies makes manufacturing and process development better handled in-house than through contractors, according to Juno, and the biotech's plan to take a slew of candidates through clinical development will depend on its ability to reliably generate modified T cells. And Juno, planning to get 10 more candidates into clinical trials this year, is extending the same philosophy through the Stage Cell deal and the acquired specialty technology for harvesting T cells from patients.
Foto: courtesy of Juno, showing T cells in action. (with material of FierceBiotech)