Date: 2015-06-02
Type of information: Company acquisition
Acquired company: X-Body (USA - MA)
Acquiring company: Juno Therapeutics (USA - WA)
Amount: $ 21 million and success-based payments
Terms: * On June 2, 2015, Juno Therapeutics announced that it has acquired X-Body, a privately held biotechnology company with nine employees based in Waltham, Massachusetts. The acquisition furthers Juno's strategy of investing in technologies that augment the company's capabilities to create best-in-class engineered T cells against a broad array of cancer targets. Juno will incorporate this platform into its process for creating CAR T constructs, using it to generate new binding domains from fully-human naïve single chain variable fragment (scFv)-formatted libraries. The initial consideration for the X-BODY acquisition was approximately $21 million in cash and 439,265 shares of Juno stock. Juno has also agreed to make success-based payments in cash to the sellers upon the achievement of certain research, clinical, and regulatory milestones for products that are generated using the X-Body technology, as well as certain additional cash payments following commercialization.
Details: X-Body's acquisition brings in-house to Juno an innovative discovery platform that interrogates the human antibody repertoire, rapidly selecting fully human antibodies with desired characteristics, even against difficult targets. Since its founding in 2008, by Richard W. Wagner, Ph.D., Brant Binder, and Gordon Binder, X-BODY has been focused on the discovery of human monoclonal antibodies against challenging membrane targets, and more recently the discovery of TCR binding domains. X-Body has developed technologies that produce highly stable and functional binding molecules.
Related: cell therapy
