Amidst the long-running Cas9 patent battle, Editas Medicine has struck a deal to sell a portion of its future revenue stream from Vertex Pharmaceuticals to a subsidiary of DRI Healthcare in return for an immediate $57m cash boost.
This move follows a December 2023 licence agreement in which Vertex paid Editas $50m upfront for nonexclusive rights to its ex vivo Cas9 gene editing technology. The technology targets the BCL11A gene in the blood disorders of sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. The deal encompasses Casgevy (exagamglogene autotemcel), the world’s first approved gene therapy that treats sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. Casgevy was co-developed by Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics. The deal gave Vertex access to Editas' tool for future advancements of the gene therapy.
In return for $57m upfront, Editas will surrender up to 100% of certain future annual payments from Vertex, which could range between $5m and $40m a year, according to the 3 October announcement. Editas will also give up part of a potential $50m payment it could receive from Vertex if certain conditions are met. However, Editas keeps the rights to fixed payments for 2024 and could also get an additional payment if Vertex hits certain sales targets.
Editas said that by monetising these future payments now, it strengthens its cash position while DRI Healthcare gains access to potential recurring revenue from Vertex’s licencing fees.
CEO of Editas, Gilmore O’Neill said: “We are pleased to partner with DRI to monetise a portion of the licensing payments from the Vertex Cas9 license deal we announced last December, providing us with considerable non-dilutive capital that we can put to work immediately as we develop our pipeline of future medicines.”
The deal comes after a long legal battle over who owns key patents for CRISPR technology, which was discovered by several researchers and the basis of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry that was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna. Charpentier is the founder of CRISPR Therapeutics. The University of Vienna and the University of California challenged the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, over who had rights to the technology. In February 2022, the Broad Institute won a US Patent and Trademark Office Ruling.
Editas licenced the technology from the Broad Institute, giving it the exclusive rights to use certain patents of human applications of CRISPR, including for RNA-guided nuclease Cas9 owned and co-owned by The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Rockefeller University, according to a 13 December 2023 press release by Editas. CRISPR-Cas9 is a gene-editing technology that allows scientists to precisely cut and modify DNA in living organisms.
This legal fight is still ongoing, where Charpentier and Doudna’s patents are being challenged in the US and European patent courts. Their European patents were weakened in August 2024 after a ruling from a European technical appeals board said their original patent filing didn’t clearly explain how to use CRISPR and it doesn’t count as a proper invention.
