Pharma giant Pfizer to acquire Chapel Hill’s Bamboo Therapeutics

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer plans to acquire Chapel Hill biomedical startup Bamboo Therapeutics in a $150 million deal that could be worth as much as $645 million from additional milestone payments to Bamboo’s owners and investors.

As part of the deal, Pfizer would also acquire Bamboo’s gene therapy manufacturing facility, which Bamboo acquired from UNC-Chapel Hill in January. Formerly known as the UNC Vector Core Facility, it supplies materials for several health care companies and academic institutions.

Most of Bamboo’s employees will continue working for Pfizer, the company said.

“Bamboo has fewer than 40 colleagues, and nearly all have been offered positions within Pfizer,” said Pfizer spokesman Dean Mastrojohn. “Bamboo’s physical space is an approximately 11,000-square foot, fully staffed and operational manufacturing facility in Chapel Hill, N.C. Pfizer will retain the facility there.”

Bamboo specializes in developing gene therapies for rare diseases that affect the central nervous system. Gene therapy is an emerging technology that attacks the disorder by repairing mutated genes. Bamboo’s technology, which has not yet been tested on humans, uses viruses to deliver a corrected copy of the gene to the patient’s cells to override the gene that mutated.

Bamboo is enrolling patients for its first clinical trial to test its experimental treatment on patients with Giant Anoxal Neuropathy, an inherited genetic disorder that causes difficulties in walking, rapid back-and-forth eye movement and is marked by dull, tightly curled hair.

Though a number of gene therapy research and development projects are underway in this country, there are no gene therapy treatments approved for patient use in the United States. Bamboo’s portfolio of gene therapies also targets Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, Friedreich’s Ataxia and Canavan disease.

The acquisition would expand Pfizer’s expertise in gene therapy. Earlier this year New York-based Pfizer made a $43 million investment in Bamboo, acquiring about 22 percent of the Chapel Hill company. Under the deal announced Monday, Pfizer would acquire the rest of Bamboo for $150 million, and Bamboo shareholders would be eligible for up to $495 million in milestone payments if Bamboo’s gene therapies succeed in lab tests, win regulatory approval and become commercially available.

According to Pfizer, there are about 7,000 known rare diseases, but only 5 percent have an approved medication. In 2014, Pfizer established a Genetic Medicines Institute within the company’s Rare Disease Research Unit, one of several rare disease initiatives and collaborations that Pfizer is undertaking.

Bamboo’s chief scientific officer, executive chairman and co-founder, Richard Jude Samulski, will continue working for the company. Samulski is the director of UNC’s 20-year-old Gene Therapy Center.

Bamboo is a spinout of Chapel Hill-based Asklepios Biopharmaceutical, a gene-delivery technology company founded in 2003 by current Bamboo executives, according to the N.C. Biotechnology Center. Samulski was recruited to UNC from the University of Pittsburgh with the help of a $430,000 Faculty Recruitment Grant from the biotech center in 1993, according to the center’s web site.

This story was originally published August 1, 2016 at 3:33 PM with the headline "Pharma giant Pfizer to acquire Chapel Hill’s Bamboo Therapeutics."