Eli Lilly Signs $800M Deal to Acquire Prevail Therapeutics

Eli Lilly & Company recently announced that it will acquire Prevail Therapeutics in an $800 million pharmaceutical acquisition deal.

The acquisition agreement will establish a new modality for drug discovery and development at Eli Lilly & Company, extending the company’s research efforts through a new gene therapy program. 

Prevail, a biotechnology company developing potentially disease-modifying AAV9-based gene therapies for patients with neurodegenerative diseases, will provide its portfolio of clinical-stage and preclinical neuroscience assets to anchor Eli Lilly & Company’s initiative. 

"Gene therapy is a promising approach with the potential to deliver transformative treatments for patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Gaucher and dementia," Mark Mintun, MD, vice president of pain and neurodegeneration research at Eli Lilly & Company, said in the announcement. 

"The acquisition of Prevail will bring critical technology and highly skilled teams to complement our existing expertise at Lilly, as we build a new gene therapy program anchored by well-researched assets. We look forward to completing the proposed acquisition and working with Prevail to advance their groundbreaking work through clinical development,” Mintun continued. 

Prevail’s lead gene therapies in clinical development are PR001 for patients with Parkinson’s disease with GBA1 mutations, neuronopathic Gaucher disease, and PR006 for patients with frontotemporal dementia with GRN mutations. 

Additionally, the company’s preclinical pipeline includes PR004 for patients with specific synucleinopathies, Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and other neurodegenerative disorders. 

Over the past three years, Prevail has advanced two first-in-class gene therapy programs into clinical development and developed a broad pipeline with great potential to impact patients in need of disease-modifying treatment options, said Asa Abeliovich, MD, PhD, founder and chief executive officer of Prevail.

“With its global scale and resources, Lilly will be the ideal organization to maximize the potential of our pipeline and accelerate our ability to bring these therapies to as many patients as possible. We look forward to working together to advance our shared mission,” Abeliovich said.

Under the terms of agreement, Eli Lilly & Company will acquire all outstanding shares of Prevail for $880 million, or $22.50 per share in cash. Prevail stockholders can receive up to $4.00 per share in cash based on the first regulatory approval for commercial sale of a Prevail product in the US, UK, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, or Spain.

The companies expect the transaction to close in the first quarter of 2021.

In the US, the cell and gene therapy market has substantially increased over the past few years todominate the therapy market with highest absolute growth of more than 500 percent and growing at a CAGR of around 36 percent, according to a 2019 Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) report.

As of March 2020, there were 362 investigational cell and gene therapies in clinical development, a 20 percent increase from 2018. 

At the end of November, Eli Lilly & Company and Precision BioSciences announced a collaboration to research and develop potential in vivo gene therapies for genetic disorders.

The collaboration and exclusive license agreement will give Eli Lilly & Company access to Precision’s proprietary ARCUS genome editing platform, which enables a range of therapeutic editing. 

Specifically, the companies will initially focus on Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) therapies, as well as two other undisclosed gene targets.

“This collaboration with Precision BioSciences represents another milestone in the realization of our vision to create medicines with transformational potential, using new therapeutic modalities such as gene editing to tackle targets and indications which were previously undruggable,” Andrew Adams, PhD, vice president of new therapeutic modalities at Eli Lilly & Company, said in the November announcement.

FDA estimated it will approve up to 20 cell and gene therapy products a year by 2025.