Bluebird Bio sells itself to investment firms, avoids bankruptcy

From STAT's Jason Mast: Bluebird Bio announced this morning it would sell itself and its portfolio of gene therapies to the investment firms Carlyle and SK Capital for less than $30 million, in a deal that lets the beleaguered biotech avoid bankruptcy.

Bluebird shareholders will receive around $3 per share but can obtain another $6.87 per share in a contingent value right, or CVR, if Bluebird’s portfolio of therapies start to become commercially successful, bringing in at least $600 million per year by 2027.

The company had entered today with a market cap of $68.4 million and was increasingly in danger of simply running out of cash.

It's sale to private equity marks a quiet end for the biotech, that over the course of a dizzying decade, showcased both the power of modern genetic medicine to deliver cures for devastating rare diseases and the profound challenges any company would face in turning that power into a sustainable business.

markets

Gene-editing stocks are creeping back up

Also from Jason Mast: In the last couple of days, investors in gene-editing companies have gotten some of their first relief in a long while: CRISPR stocks are actually, shockingly, ever-so-slightly up. CRISPR Therapeutics is up 15% over the last five days. Intellia is up nearly 30%. Editas Medicine, which had plummeted to nearly a $1 per share amid repeated turnover and strategy changes, almost tripled before settling down to a roughly $2 plateau.

It’s a welcome lift for the companies and their backers after nearly three years of plummeting valuations across the sector. But it is a tad head-scratching. None of the factors that have held down the field — delivery challenges, reimbursement questions, competition from more conventional medicines, high interest rates — have changed. No new data have been announced.

Markets, of course, sometimes do weird things. But it’s possible this is a sign the gene-editing sector has finally bottomed out. Investors had taken a significant short position, over 20%, in each of those companies. If they closed out those positions, by purchasing the now hyper-deflated shares, it would boost valuations — temporarily at least.

Politics

An awkward moment for Bourla in Washington

Albert Bourla, the Pfizer CEO and incoming chairman of the trade group PhRMA, was in Washington yesterday to meet with President Trump at the White House.

Both sides remained tight-lipped about the closed-door discussions, but Bourla joined Trump in the afternoon at a public event marking Black History Month. Speaking to the audience gathered in the East Room of the White House, Trump welcomed Bourla.

“We also have the head of Pfizer here, so I want to thank him,” Trump said, singling the CEO out in the audience. “One of the great, great people, one of the great businessmen.”

The crowd was less enthused, and immediately began booing — a reminder that even if drugmakers can find their way into Trump's good graces, work remains to be done by the industry on public perceptions.

public health

CDC's vaccine efforts seem headed for a shakeup

The future of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee seems uncertain: A scheduled February meeting for the ACIP, which advises the agency on vaccine policy and whose decisions insurance coverage, has been postponed, STAT's Helen Branswell reports.

It was to be the panel's first meeting to take place under the Trump administration and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has criticized the ACIP. The cancellation also came as Politico reported that Kennedy may replace members he perceives to have conflicts of interest.

A U.S. official said the meeting would be rescheduled but vaccine experts' concerns were not allayed. “This is step 1 of trying to eliminate CDC as a group that makes [vaccine] recommendations,” said Paul Offit, an infectious diseases expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, Helen reports, HHS has ordered the CDC to halt some paid promotions for vaccines so it can refocus on promoting the idea of “informed consent” in vaccine decision-making instead.

diagnostics

Experimental tool could diagnose infectious, autoimmune disease

Stanford researchers have developed a tool that can analyze immune cell receptors to diagnose diseases like Covid-19, HIV, flu, lupus, and type 1 diabetes by probing the immune system’s memory of past infections. Their study, published in Science, sequenced millions of B and T cells from nearly 600 participants and trained models to classify disease states with over 85% accuracy.

While promising, the machine learning-based test is still in early stages and not yet clinical viable; autoimmune diseases are particularly variable and challenging.

“You're not going to go and get your T cells and B cells sequenced to diagnose whether you have Covid, right?” one researcher not involved in the work told STAT. “I think if, and this is a big if, the cells in the blood reveal what's going on in the tissues when you don't have access to those tissues, this could be a means of diagnosing diseases that previously were very difficult to diagnose through other means.”

podcast

How will FDA staff cuts affect the drug industry?

Are companies pushing for too much weight loss from new drugs? And what will bring biotech out of its doldrums? We discuss all that and more on the latest episode of “The Readout LOUD.”

Mizuho analyst Jared Holz joins to discuss Adam's column on biotech's dark period. We also talk about Elaine's latest article on the push for greater and greater weight loss from obesity drugs, along with developments at Solid Biosciences and federal job cuts.

Listen here.

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