The all-stock asset acquisition is valued at $58.7m.
AC Immune – a Swiss biopharmaceutical company working on precision medicine for neurodegenerative diseases – says the acquisition will make it ‘a leader in the development of therapeutics and diagnostics for Parkinson’s disease’. It will immediately launch a Phase 2 study for the newly acquired vaccine candidate.
Meanwhile, AC Immune has also announced a $25m private share placement with a group of investors led by Athos Service GmbH (one of the lead investors in BioNTech).
PD01: vaccine candidate for Parkinson’s
Under the terms of the agreement, AC Immune is acquiring all of Affiris’ assets and underlying intellectual property related to active vaccine candidates targeting a-syn and $5m in cash for 7.1 million shares based on a price of $8.26 per common share. This share price represents a 10.7% premium compared to the closing price of AC Immune shares as of July 23, 2021.
Affiris is an Austrian clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, working across neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, multiple system atrophy, dementia with Lewy Bodies and Huntington’s disease.
Affiris PD01 is a vaccine designed to generate a target-specific antibody response against pathological oligomeric a-syn (Parkinson’s disease is causally linked to pathological aggregation and deposition of a-syn, a drug target that has been validated in clinical studies using monoclonal antibodies).
Phase 1 results published in The Lancet Neurology showed that PD01 generated substantial, long-lasting and boostable antibody responses against pathological forms of a-syn that were accompanied by target engagement and signals of clinical efficacy.