A day after getting a nice fat—and sorely needed—paycheck from Bristol Myers Squibb, BridgeBio has added $110 million to its coffers by selling off a priority review voucher.
Before this week, BridgeBio needed rescuing. The company had resorted to layoffs after a baffling phase 3 failure for its lead transthyretin amyloidosis drug candidate acoramidis late last year. Earlier in May, the company put out a plea for deals to out-license six of its other therapies in development.
In walked Bristol Myers, not to pluck one of the six drugs from the list but to offer up as much as $905 million for the SHP2 inhibitor BBP-398 to combine with the Big Pharma’s checkpoint inhibitor Opdivo. It was the salvation BridgeBio desperately needed, but it turns out the biotech was not quite done wheeling and dealing.
Friday morning, the company announced the sale of a rare pediatric disease priority review voucher to an undisclosed buyer for $110 million. The voucher was handed out back in February 2021 when BridgeBio’s affiliate Origin Biosciences was granted approval for the rare brain disease dysfunction treatment Nulibry. The treatment is for reducing the risk of death in patients who have molybdenum cofactor deficiency type A, a metabolic disorder characterized by severe developmental delay and death by age 4.
As part of the voucher sale, BridgeBio has also shored up a two-year extension of its existing senior secured credit facility. Principal repayment has now been pushed out to November 2026.
“The sale of this voucher will help us advance our pipeline of drug development programs targeting genetic diseases and cancers,” said BridgeBio CFO Brian Stephenson, Ph.D. “We believe this deal, coupled with our amended loan agreement, offers us the opportunity to read out more data within the duration of our debt and advance meaningful medicines to patients in need in the years to come.”
BridgeBio has a number of other therapies in development, including BBP-418 for limb-girdle muscular dystrophy type 2i. The company posted data in March linking the treatment to positive biomarker changes, teeing up conversations with regulators about a path to market.