A company developing therapies for inflammatory diseases has found itself a buyer in one of the world’s largest drugmakers, less than two years after its launch and without any product candidates yet in clinical development.
San Diego-based Jecure Therapeutics said Tuesday that it will be acquired by Genentech, part of Swiss drugmaker Roche. Under the terms of the deal, Genentech will acquire Jecure’s entire portfolio of NLRP3 inhibitors. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, a Genentech spokesperson wrote in an email.
The company started in 2015 with seed funding from San Francisco-based Versant Ventures, before the venture capital firm formally launched the company in February 2017 as its sole investor, with a $20 million Series A funding round. The company was launched to develop therapies for nonalcoholic steatohepatitis – also known as NASH – and fibrosis. Two of Jecure’s founders, CEO Jeffrey Stafford and Chief Scientific Officer James Veal, served in senior management for Quanticel Pharmaceuticals, another Versant-founded firm, which Celgene acquired in 2015.
The Genentech acquisition comes a month after another venture capital firm, New York-based OrbiMed, launched its own NASH-focused startup, 89Bio, in collaboration with other investors. Headquartered in San Francisco and maintaining research and development operations in Herzliya, Israel, 89Bio was launched with a $60 million Series A round and will take on a pipeline of drugs from Israel’s largest drugmaker, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries.
According to a market forecast report in August from ResearchAndMarkets.com, NASH is projected to become the leading cause of liver transplantation in the US in the coming years. However, it said that poor diagnosis of the disease due to the lack of ideal diagnostic technologies will limit the growth of the market. That market was valued at $1.17 billion last year and is expected to grow to $21.47 billion by 2025. Another report by the same research firm last month projected that the therapeutics and diagnostics market would grow at a 25 percent annual rate between this year and 2023, driven by the rising prevalence of people with diabetes and obesity.
Photo: designer491, Getty Images
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