J&J is acquiring this Aescap Life Sciences portfolio company for $132 per share. This represents a 39% premium to Friday’s closing price of $ 94,87. The deal is valued at $ 14,6 billion.

A 39% premium may not seem like much. However, there was already some takeover speculation in the share price, which rose earlier as a result. Also, the fairly large absolute price typically comes with a more modest takeover premium.

Aescap invested in Intra-Cellular in June 2023 at a share price of $ 61. Prior to the takeover announcement, the position represented 7,5% of the Life Sciences Fund’s portfolio.

Intra-Cellular Therapies develops medicines for the treatment of neurological disorders. Currently, it has one medicine on the market: Caplyta. Approved for the treatment of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Approval is pending for the treatment of depression. It also has several clinical trials underway, including for products to treat Parkinson’s disease and psychosis associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Following positive feedback from the FDA around a potential approval of its treatment of Huntington’s disease, the share price of Uniqure rose by 110% yesterday.

This large increase in the share price is not a surprise. There is no treatment available for this severe disease which causes nerve cells in the brain to gradually die.

The gene therapy treatment of Uniqure has the potential to generate multi-billions of euros in revenues, while the company’s valuation on the stock exchange, even after the news, is only $ 250 million above its net cash position. At the closing of the market, the market cap was $ 746 million. An interesting detail is that yesterday’s trading volume of Uniqure was 79x its average volume.

Before the news, Uniqure made up 6,6% of the Genetics fund and 3,1% of the Life Sciences fund.

Aescap Life Sciences is currently up around 18% for 2024. Aescap Genetics performance has gone up over the last few months but is still underwater at -3% for the year. Delays of gene therapy approvals earlier in 2024 (caused by this market segment growing so rapidly and the FDA not being able to hire enough staff to process all of the clinical data) discouraged some investors from investing in gene therapy companies. In November the head of the FDA’s gene therapy division stated that those delays should be behind us.

Uniqure has 1 gene therapy on the market. Next to Huntington’s medicine, 3 other medicines are being tested in humans. For 2025 we expect Uniqure to go through multiple significant value-generating events.

Today Roche announced the acquisition of Aescap Genetics’ portfolio company Poseida Therapeutics for $ 9 per share, a premium of 215% over yesterday’s closing share price of $ 2,86.

Poseida shareholders also receive a CVR (contingent value rights) of $ 4, consisting of 3 payments of respectively $ 2, $ 1 and $1 upon the achievement of specific future milestones. The total acquisition price is $ 1,5 billion.

Aescap Genetics began building a position in Poseida Therapeutics in August. The position accounted for 1% of the Genetics fund portfolio prior to the take-over announcement. The intention was to build the position to 4% of the fund pending the upcoming clinical trial data in December. This acquisition therefore came early in our build-up process.

Poseida signed a collaboration with Roche in 2022 on several of the medicine candidates it has in its pipeline. Therefore, Roche was able to see the clinical trial data from those products before others.

San Diego-based Poseida Therapeutics is developing so-called next-generation allogeneic CAR-T cancer treatments. While another form of CAR-T therapy is already on the market by companies such as J&J, Gilead and BMS, these treatments are associated with high costs, lengthy treatment processes, manufacturing limitations, and serious side effects. The newer allogeneic CAR-Ts address these challenges and show improvements in all areas.

The acquisition is good news for both patients and shareholders.

Aescap also has other allogenic CAR-T companies in its portfolio of 22 companies.

On October 16th, the Aescap Life Sciences fund gained 11,7% and the Genetics fund 12,5%.

This rise was driven by our holdings in ProQR Therapeutics (in both funds) and Wave Life Sciences (Genetics fund).

The increase in both companies was caused by data from a clinical trial for a Wave Life Sciences medicine. This product uses an RNA-editing technology patented by ProQR. ProQR itself is developing several medicines based on this technology, 10 of which are out-licensed to multinational Eli Lilly.

At close of trading yesterday:
– ProQR: +122% YTD +103%
– Wave: +74% YTD +195%

Prior to the news, ProQR made up 7% of both the Aescap Life Sciences Fund and the Genetics Fund. Wave was 2% of Aescap Genetics.

A number of other Genetics portfolio companies also made significant gains, including gene therapy company Uniqure (up 15%) and Rocket Pharmaceuticals (up 8%).

We are expecting important news from several portfolio companies later this year.

For the first time in history, a company has demonstrated an effective treatment for Huntington’s disease.

Japan’s Asahi Kasei Corp. announced that it intends to buy Calliditas Therapeutics at a premium of 83%. Yesterday, Calliditas closed at SEK 113,6. Asahi Kasei’s offer is SEK 208. 

AstraZeneca announced that it has come to an agreement to acquire Aescap Life Sciences portfolio company Fusion Pharmaceuticals for $ 21 and a CVR (Contingent value right) of $ 3 per share.

Aescap portfolio company 4DMT saw its share price increase by 85% yesterday after it announced positive results from its clinical trial for a gene therapy treatment of a form of macular degeneration (Wet AMD).

The biotech sector has been going through some heavy turmoil since the start of the Covid-19 epidemic. Nonetheless, with the sector being back on track but still being seriously undervalued compared to other sectors, it is a promising sector for investors again. Read why!

Today, the FDA approved the world’s first ‘gene-editing’ therapy, Casgevy. This treatment for sickle cell disease (SCD) is based on the 2020 Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR/Cas9 technology and is developed by Aescap portfolio companies Crispr and Vertex