Against the backdrop of a Cas9 patent battle that refuses to die, Editas Medicine is cashing in a chunk of the licensing rights from Vertex Pharmaceuticals to the tune of $57 million.
Last last year, Vertex paid Editas $50 million upfront—with potential for a further $50 million contingent payment and annual licensing fees—for the nonexclusive rights to Editas’ Cas9 tech for ex vivo gene editing medicines targeting the BCL11A gene in sickle cell disease (SCD) and beta thalassemia. The deal covered Vertex’s CRISPR Therapeutics-partnered Casgevy, which had secured FDA approval for SCD days earlier.
Now, Editas has sold on some of those same rights to a subsidiary of healthcare royalties company DRI Healthcare. In return for $57 million upfront, Editas is handing over the rights for “up to 100%” of those annual license fees from Vertex—which are set to range from $5 million to $40 million a year—as well as a “mid-double-digit percentage” portion of the $50 million contingent payment.
Editas will still keep hold of the license fee for this year as well as a “mid-single-digit million-dollar payment” in store if Vertex hits specific sales milestones. Editas remains focused on getting its own gene therapy, reni-cel, ready for regulators—with readouts from studies in SCD and transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia due by the end of the year.
The cash infusion from DRI will “help enable further pipeline development and related strategic priorities,” Editas said in an Oct. 3 release.
“We are pleased to partner with DRI to monetize a portion of the licensing payments from the Vertex Cas9 license deal we announced last December, providing us with considerable non-dilutive capital that we can put to work immediately as we develop our pipeline of future medicines,” Editas CEO Gilmore O’Neill said. “We look forward to an ongoing relationship with DRI as we continue to execute our strategy.”
The agreement with Vertex in December 2023 was part of a long-running legal battle brought by two universities and one of the founders of the gene editing technique, Nobel Prize winner Emmanuelle Charpentier, Ph.D. Alongside fellow Nobel Prize laureate Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D., Charpentier created a type of genetic scissors that can be used to cut any DNA molecule.
This was dubbed CRISPR/Cas9 and has been used to create gene editing therapies by dozens of biotechs, including Editas, which licensed the tech from the Broad Institute of MIT.
In February 2023, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled in favor of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard over Charpentier, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Vienna. After that decision, Editas became the exclusive licensee of certain CRISPR patents for developing human medicines including a Cas9 patent estate owned and co-owned by Harvard University, the Broad Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rockefeller University.
The legal battle isn’t over yet, though, with Charpentier and the universities variously challenging decisions in both U.S. and European patent courts.