Rumours that Eli Lilly planned to buy Ventyx Biosciences have been confirmed.
A report in the Wall Street Journal, has been proved correct as Lilly announced a $14-per-share offer for the company that valued it at $1.2 billion.
Shares in Ventyx – which has drugs in clinical trials for autoimmune, inflammatory, and neurodegenerative diseases – shot up nearly 58% in premarket trading after the rumour was published, taking its value well into unicorn territory.
The San Diego-based company’s lead programme is an oral inhibitor of the inflammatory mediator NLRP3, VTX2735, which is in a phase 2 trial involving patients with recurrent pericarditis. The rare condition, associated with inflammation of the fluid-filled membrane that surrounds the heart, affects around 40,000 people in the US.
An interim analysis from the trial is scheduled to take place at an R&D update that will be hosted by Ventyx in the first quarter of this year, but the company has already demonstrated anti-inflammatory proof of principle with VTX2735 in an early-stage trial in cryopyrin-associated periodic syndromes (CAPS), a rare genetic disease involving overactive NLRP.
Ventyx’s pipeline includes an NLRP3 inhibitor that is able to cross the blood-brain barrier and is in mid-stage testing for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, with positive biomarker data in hand, as well as obesity-associated cardiometabolic diseases.
Ventyx’s other major R&D track is in inflammatory bowel diseases, headed by tamuzimod (VTX002), which it describes as a potential best-in-class S1P receptor modulator that could compete with marketed drugs in the class like Bristol Myers Squibb’s Zeposia (ozanimod) and Pfizer’s Velsipity (etrasimod).
