Pearl Bio's synthetic amino acids draw $1B bet from Merck & Co.
12 Mar 2024
Merck & Co. has entered into an agreement valued at potentially $1 billion, with a focus on creating engineered biologics for cancer. The partnership announced Tuesday is centred on Pearl Bio's synthetic biology platform, which allows for the integration of protein building blocks beyond the roughly 20 amino acids that naturally occur in nature.
Juan Alvarez, vice president of discovery biologics at Merck Research Laboratories, called Pearl Bio "a pioneer in developing recoded organisms, to produce novel biologics enabled by synthetic chemistries." The startup emerged from stealth in June of last year with the backing of Khosla Ventures and a slate of 24 patents protecting its flagship genomically recoded organisms (GROs) technology.
"We are excited to demonstrate the power of Pearl's technology in our partnership with Merck to create multi-functionalised therapeutic candidates with tunable properties solving for some of the key shortcomings confronting biologics," explained president Amy Cayne Schwartz, who co-founded the startup along with Farren Isaacs of Yale University and Michael Jewett of Stanford University.
New therapeutic properties
Pearl Bio's platform allows for the incorporation of "non-standard amino acids" into biologics, potentially unlocking new therapeutic properties such as creating proteins resistant to degradation, tailoring treatments for precise tissue and disease targeting, and attaching specialised payloads.
The collaboration highlights the growing interest and investment in the field of synthetic biology. Johnson & Johnson recently put up close to $2 billion to acquire Ambrx Biopharma, which uses an expanded genetic code platform to incorporate synthetic amino acids into proteins at any selected site. Back in 2019, Sanofi paid $2.5 billion for Synthorx and its Expanded Genetic Alphabet platform that adds a new DNA base pair to create optimised biologics.
Meanwhile, GRO Biosciences, which raised $21 million in a Series A round in 2021, is working on expanding the alphabet of amino acids to deliver on the promise of protein-based therapies. The company unveiled preclinical data recently on two programmes for non-standard amino acid therapies that it said could reverse autoimmune disease without immunosuppression and also eliminate anti-drug antibodies against immunogenic therapies.
Tuesday's agreement with Pearl Bio also marks the latest in a string of high-profile cancer-focused deals by Merck. The company recently paid Daiichi Sankyo $4 billion upfront to advance a number of antibody-drug conjugate candidates, and inked another with C4 Therapeutics centred on degrader-antibody conjugates. Earlier this year, it also bet $680 million to bolster its oncology pipeline with T-cell engager programmes via its takeout of Harpoon Therapeutics.
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