Gilead's Kite is helping Appia Bio fly a little higher with a blood cancer research and development deal that could be worth $875 million if the wind blows in the right direction.
The Culver City, California-based biotech will lead preclinical and early clinical research on two off-the-shelf cell therapies based on hematopoietic, or blood-forming stem cells, that become invariant natural killer cells (iNKT), which are a subtype of T cells. Think of it as a hybrid of natural killer cells and T cells, CEO JeenJoo "JJ" Kang, Ph.D., told Fierce Biotech at the time of the company's May series A.
Kite will provide the chimeric antigen receptors for the CAR-iNKT cells. Following the selection of product candidates, Kite will lead development, manufacturing and commercialization.
The size of the upfront payment and equity investment was kept under the hood, but the total value, including biobucks, could fly as high as $875 million. Kite could also pay tiered royalties, should any product(s) come to market.
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Appia's technology comes from research by co-founder Lili Yang, Ph.D., from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Kite has been on a spending spree lately, signing a deal with Shoreline Biosciences that could exceed $2.3 billion in June. That pact will also focus on off-the-shelf blood cancer treatments.