Bristol-Myers Squibb To Buy Adnexus Thereapeutics for $430 Million

Princeton, NJ (Sept. 24)-Reflecting a strategic interest to strengthen its position in biologics, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) agreed to acquire the biopharmaceutical company Adnexus Therapeutics (Waltham, MA) for $430 million.

“Bringing Adnexus into the Bristol-Myers Squibb family builds upon a successful and productive collaboration between the two companies in oncology and is an important step in accelerating the strategic transformation of our pharmaceutical business to a biopharma business model,” said Jim Cornelius, chief executive officer at Bristol-Myers Squibb, in a company release. “Biologics are one cornerstone of our growth strategy. This investment in biologics discovery complements our continued investment in a growing biologics pipeline and portfolio, and will benefit from our expanding biologics manufacturing capabilities, both at our existing site in Syracuse, New York, and our future large-scale bulk biologics facility in Devens, Massachusetts.”

Adnexus is a developer of a proprietary class of biologics called “Adnectins,” which are derived from fibronectin, an extracellular protein that is naturally abundant in human serum. Fibronectin binds to other proteins using protein structures called targeting domains. An Adnectin consists of a backbone of the natural amino-acid sequence of a certain domain of human fibronectin and one to three targeting loops redirected to enable an Adnectin to specifically recognize a therapeutic target of interest, according to company. The Adnectins are generated using the company’s “Profusion” proprietary protein-engineering system. According to Adnexus, although Adnectins and antibodies have targeting domains with three-dimensional shapes that resemble each other, the amino-acid sequences of each protein class are distinctly different.