Cullinan doubles down on bispecifics for autoimmune disease with Genrix deal

Dive Brief:

• After changing its name and focus, Cullinan Therapeutics is beefing up its autoimmune disease pipeline by licensing an experimental drug from China.
• The company will pay Genrix Bio $20 million up front for the rights to a bispecific T cell engager called velinotamig. Genrix is then eligible to receive as much as $692 million in payments for reaching certain development, regulatory and sales goals, plus tiered royalties.
• As part of the deal announced Wednesday, Cullinan will get the rights to the therapy in every country except China. The company plans to build on a Phase 1 study that Genrix will start this year in autoimmune disease in China, then take over development in that area.

Dive Insight:

Cullinan is one of many companies chasing the promise of a reset for the body’s immune system. Previously known as Cullinan Oncology, the company changed its name in April 2024 and undertook a “refinement” of its cancer therapy pipeline as it turned toward inflammatory conditions.

Promising results from an academic study in Germany showed that cell therapies might be able to drive hard-to-treat autoimmune diseases, like lupus, into remission. The findings sparked a wave of investment in cell therapies for inflammatory disorders, with many companies once focused on cancer joining the fray. 

But early data have been mixed. And there’s a high bar for entry for CAR-T cell therapies, which are expensive to manufacture, may carry dangerous side effects and typically involve chemotherapy to prepare the body for treatment. Some companies in the field, including Kyverna Therapeutics, have suffered share declines and reshuffled leadership.

Dual-acting antibodies known as T-cell engagers may offer a more convenient alternative. Their promise has prompted a gold rush among venture investors as well as pharmaceutical companies, including GSK and Merck & Co. As with Cullinan, a number of the deals involved assets originally from China.

Velinotamig is designed to target BCMA, a protein on the surface of the B cells that malfunctions in many autoimmune conditions. It’s shown promise in a Phase 2 study of patients with multiple myeloma, Cullinan said. And Cullinan plans to advance a form of the medicine under development by Genrix that can be injected rather than administered with an intravenous infusion, analysts with William Blair wrote in a research note.

Cullinan said its latest acquisition will complement the development of another bispecific called CLN-978, which binds to a different B cell protein called CD19. Originally designed to treat B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Cullinan is now testing CLN-978 as a therapy for lupus.

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