Lilly buys Beam’s option on Verve drug programmes

Eli Lilly has agreed to buy a gene-editing programme for cardiovascular diseases from Beam Therapeutics in a deal, valued at up to $600 million, that ties in with the biotech’s recent restructuring drive.

Beam is selling Lilly the opt-in rights to a trio of candidates covered by an agreement it signed with Verve Therapeutics in 2019 for $200 million in upfront cash, plus a $50 million equity investment and possible $350 million in future milestone payments.

That agreement saw Verve deploy Beam’s base editing technology to develop candidates targeting PCSK9 and ANGPTL3 – both with the potential to lower cholesterol – as well as another undisclosed programme in the cardiovascular disease area.

Lilly now gets rights to those programmes, adding to an agreement it made independently with Verve earlier this year focusing on Verve’s preclinical stage in vivo gene-editing programme targeting lipoprotein(a), a risk factor for atherosclerotic disease.

For Beam, the agreement comes just a few days after it announced a plan to cut its workforce by 20% – around 100 employees – and reduce its R&D portfolio in order to reduce its cash burn and make sure its operations are funded into 2026.

The biotech has decided to focus its efforts on certain drug candidates like BEAM-101 and ESCAPE for sickle cell disease and BEAM-302 for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency and offer others up for partnering, and said the Lilly deal “provides meaningful upfront capital to advance our portfolio.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Lilly can opt-in to share 33% of development expenses for the PCSK9 and ANGPTL3 programmes, with 50:50 commercial rights in the US, with Verve currently retaining all rights elsewhere. Specifics of the terms for the third project are not being disclosed.

Verve has two PCSK9 candidates, led by VERVE 101, which is in the phase 1b heart-1 trial in the UK and New Zealand in patients with heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HeFH). Follow-up candidate VERVE-102 is due to start clinical testing in the first half of next year and is also being developed initially for HeFH.

Meanwhile, ANGPTL3-targeting VERVE-201 is due to start trials in the latter half of 2024 as a potential treatment for homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HoFH), a rare and often fatal genetic subtype of premature atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD).

“Base editing represents a potentially important new therapeutic approach for a wide range of diseases,” said Ruth Gimeno, head of diabetes, obesity and cardiometabolic research at Lilly.

“We believe that single-course gene editing treatments could be a compelling new therapeutic option for patients at risk of cardiovascular disease, and we look forward to working with Verve toward that goal,” she added.