Fresh off a $153 million series E round, Arthrosi Therapeutics is skipping an IPO route and is instead being bought up for a potential value of $1.5 billion from Swedish biopharma Sobi.
Under the deal, San Diego-based Arthrosi will secure $950 million upfront as well as a contingent consideration of up to $550 million. For its part, Sobi gets its hands on Arthrosi’s pozdeutinurad, a next-gen, once-daily oral URAT1 inhibitor.
This med is being assessed in several phase 3 tests for progressive and tophaceous gout, with initial readouts slated for next year.
“The acquisition of Arthrosi allows us to expand our gout pipeline with a highly differentiated new asset,” Guido Oelkers, president and CEO of Sobi, said in a statement.
“Pozdeutinurad has the potential to become the therapy of choice for patients who have progressive gout with persistent and unresolved symptoms despite first-line therapy,” the CEO added.
Gout is a type of arthritis that causes sudden, severe joint pain. Common drug treatment includes simple pain relief, but pharma has been working on potential curative treatments for decades, though with mixed results.
Arthrosi’s leading drug candidate is an inhibitor of URAT1, a transporter that has been a target for gout drugs going back to the approval of probenecid in 1951.
Probenecid and other early gout drugs hit multiple targets but also caused a range of side effects. Seeking to avoid the adverse events, developers of subsequent waves of gout drugs tried to create more potent and specific URAT1 inhibitors.
AstraZeneca acquired a URAT1 inhibitor in its $1.3 billion takeover of Ardea Biosciences in 2012 and won FDA approval for the drug in 2015. By 2020, the product, Zurampic, had, however, landed on the scrap heap.
The commercial struggles of Zurampic, which carried a boxed warning, didn't deter others from trying to launch URAT1 inhibitors.
A team behind Zurampic has reformed at Crystalys Therapeutics to advance dotinurad, a URAT1 inhibitor that is approved in Asian markets including Japan. And China’s Atom Therapeutic recently reported a phase 2b/3 win for its own URAT1 inhibitor, lingdolinurad.