Sorrento Therapeutics (SRNE) has sold lead drug candidate Cynviloq to NantPharma, founded by healthcare entrepreneur & SRNE’s largest investor, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and a subsidiary of partner NantWorks. Sorrento gave the drug up for $90 million in cash and a possible $1.2 billion in development and sales-based milestone payments.
Cynviloq emerged from a phase 3 bioequivalence study earlier this month comparing the drug to Celgene’s (CELG) Abraxane. Both drugs are essentially re-formulations of paclitaxel, and Sorrento bills Cynviloq as a more potent and safer version of Abraxane, pursuing an approval through the FDA’s 505b2 program. Details were scant, but Sorrento said analysis, “suggests that Cynviloq meets the bioequivalence (BE) criteria for both total and unbound paclitaxel.”
That’s enough for Patrick Soon-Shiong, apparently, who discovered and developed Abraxane before selling it to Celgene in 2010. Abraxane is expected to do about $1.2 billion in sales this year.
Soon-Shiong already has close ties to Sorrento. In December he bought a 19.9% stake in the smaller company – making him SRNE’s largest shareholder – and the two created a joint-venture to develop cancer-targeted immunotherapies. Given that he’s a major Sorrento investor, one might view the cash outlay as simply shuffling cards, moving capital from one investment to the other.
The divestment leaves Sorrento with one clinical stage asset, resiniferatoxin, a non-opiate TRPV1 agonist currently in a phase 1/2 study at the NIH, and an early antibody and immunotherapy development program.
One or more of PropThink’s contributors are long CELG.
