Sanofi to acquire Kiadis for €308m

Pharmaceutical company Sanofi will acquire cell-based immunotherapy company Kiadis for €308 million in a public offer agreed to by both groups.

The acquisition will give Sanofi access to Kiadis’ K-NK-cell platform, which is designed to make products rapidly and economically available for a broad patient population across a wide range of indication. NK, or natural killer cells, seek and identify malignant cancer cells and have broad application across various tumour types.

John Reed, global head of Research and Development of Sanofi, said, “We believe Kiadis’ ‘off the shelf’ K-NK cell technology platform will have broad application against liquid and solid tumors, and create synergies with Sanofi’s emerging immuno-oncology pipeline, providing opportunities for us to pursue potential best-in-disease approaches.”

Arthur Lahr, chief executive officer of Kiadis, commented: “Kiadis’ vision is to bring novel cell-based medicines to people with life-threatening diseases, and this transaction will help achieve that vision. After the discontinuation of our lead product candidate and subsequent reorganisation in 2019, we restarted Kiadis early in 2020 as an entirely new company focused solely on the proprietary and differentiated NK-cell platform that we obtained through the acquisition of CytoSen Therapeutics. Sanofi’s offer is a clear testimony to the uniqueness of our NK-cell platform and the rapid success of Kiadis’ transformation. The Kiadis Boards unanimously believe that Sanofi has the resources and financial strength to accelerate development of our NK-cell products, to the benefit of patients. We believe this transaction represents compelling value to shareholders and offers a fair reflection of the potential of our platform and pipeline, given the risk/reward profile typical to biotech and the capital required to execute our business plan. Finally, this transaction will provide excellent career opportunities for our employees, who will be viewed by Sanofi as their internal cell-therapy experts.”

Sanofi will utilise its resources to advance Kiadis’ pipeline of therapeutics, which includes NK-cell-based medicines for the treatment of patients undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplant, liquid and solid tumours, as well as infectious disease.