Shares of Bluebird Bio (BLUE) are down 3% in after-hours trade after the company reported that Celgene (CELG) is reducing the deal that both companies reached back in 2013. In the 2013 deal Celgene made an undisclosed payment amount to Bluebird on top of future payments up to $225 million per drug for the option to license it. In addition both companies were going to split the clinical trial costs and any future revenues produced from marketed products.
The good news though is that Celgene doesn't want to abandon the partnership completely. Instead Celgene just wants to focus on the B-cell antigen portion of the compounds. That means that the company wants to collaborate with Bluebird on producing therapies for blood cancer. Under the new terms of agreement both companies will just collaborate on one blood caner target to begin with. All other therapies will be returned back to Bluebird for future use.
The technology intended on this collaboration was Bluebird's CAR-T therapy which stands for chimeric antigen receptor T-Cells. These are a patient's T-cells that are genetically engineered with an antibody that knows what protein to target in the body. This form of stimulating T-cells in a patients body to attack a specific protein on a cancer cell is known as immunotherapy. For instance in a pre-clinical trial one CAR-T therapy known as BB2121 was able to shrink multiple myeloma tumors without the cancer growing back.
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