Roche’s CEO has insisted to Fierce that the company’s view on its $1.5 billion Poseida buyout has “absolutely not” changed, even as the Swiss pharma scraps one of the CAR-T therapies from the acquisition.
The deal to acquire its partner Poseida in 2024 marked a step-up for Roche’s cell therapy ambitions, giving the Big Pharma ownership of Poseida’s platform for generating off-the-shelf—also known as allogeneic—CAR-T therapies.
But since then, the wider industry’s enthusiasm for allogeneic CAR-Ts has cooled, with some companies shifting focus to in vivo options.
In its third-quarter earnings results this morning, Roche revealed that it has ended work on RG6540, a CD19xCD20 allogeneic CAR-T aimed at heme tumors. RG6540 was one of the two clinical-stage therapies specifically name-checked in the 2024 acquisition announcement.
But when asked by Fierce on an earnings call if Roche has changed its stance on that deal, CEO Thomas Schinecker, Ph.D., was firm that nothing has changed.
“No, absolutely not. Our opinion has not changed,” Schinecker responded to Fierce on the Thursday morning call.
“In fact, I think we actually got quite a good deal in that acquisition, because a lot of the payment that was made, we would have had to pay anyway in terms of milestone payments in another partnership that we had signed some years ago.”
Despite having scrapped RG6540, Schinecker pointed out that Roche has “not stopped working” on CAR-Ts targeting CD19 and CD20.
“We just stopped working on that molecule,” he added. “So we already have new molecules that are even better coming out of that acquisition on that same target.”
RG6540 was among a clutch of phase 1-stage assets that Roche cleared out of its pipeline this morning. Others included RG6795, a CDK4 inhibitor licensed by Genentech from Rigor Pharmaceuticals that was being evaluated for HR+/HER2- breast cancer.
There was also an antisense oligonucleotide for Alzheimer’s disease dubbed RG6627, an anti-CCR8 antibody called enzelkitug for solid tumors, a TMEM16A potentiator for muco-obstructive respiratory disease called RG6421, a coronary artery disease drug called RG6622, and a geographic atrophy candidate called RG6327.