A couple of months ago, Exicure was an expiring company with no money or active pipeline. Now under new ownership, the biotech has acquired the U.S. subsidiary of Korea’s GPCR Therapeutics along with a clinical-stage blood cancer drug.
The deal will see Exicure take control of the CXCR4 antagonist burixafor, which GPCR Therapeutics USA has been investigating in a phase 2 trial in combination with the approved beta blocker propranolol and granulocyte colony-stimulating factor, a growth factor that stimulates the production of white blood cells in the bone marrow, for patients with blood cancer.
The U.S. subsidiary said interim data from 10 patients had been “promising,” with GPCR USA considering whether to run a phase 3 trial comparing burixafor with Sanofi’s stem cell mobilizer injection Mozobil.
The deal, which was signed Jan. 19, will see Exicure acquire all of GPCR Therapeutics’ shares in its U.S. unit for an undisclosed price. There is also a related licensing agreement for Exicure to develop and commercialize GPCR’s tech relating to burixafor in return for clinical, marketing and sales milestone payments.
The announcement marks an abrupt change in direction for Chicago-based Exicure. The company’s troubles began in 2021, when an internal review concluded that former neuroscience group leader Grant Corbett, Ph.D., had misreported data on a preclinical Friedreich's ataxia program. That program was axed, leaving the company hanging on to a few Big Pharma collaborations and a new lead asset in SCN9A. But AbbVie and Ipsen walked away at the end of 2022 and SCN9A flunked in vivo studies in nonhuman primates, resulting in the company searching for a way forward.
By 2023, the biotech had laid off more than three-quarters of its employees and had halted all R&D work. Last summer saw Exicure hanging onto its final $500,000 and warning that an infusion of cash was urgently needed in order to survive.
That cash arrived in the form of South Korean telecommunications company HiTron Systems, which bought $10 million of Exicure’s equity over the course of November and December. It made HiTron the majority shareholder of Exicure and allowed it to install a new CEO in the form of Andy Yoo.
At the time, Exicure hinted that part of its new funds would go toward “pursuing strategic transactions,” with plans for the GPCR US buyout unveiled soon after.