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The Swedish biotech behind a groundbreaking Alzheimer’s treatment is in talks with partners for its new technology that allows drugs to cross the notoriously tricky blood-brain barrier.
BioArctic signed the first deal for its “brain transporter” with Bristol Myers Squibb late last year. The deal is worth up to $1.4bn and allows the US drugmaker to start trials using the technology to deliver another Alzheimer’s drug.
The biotech, which created the Alzheimer’s medicine Leqembi that is now sold by Biogen and Eisai, is in talks with several other large pharmaceutical companies to license the transporter, hoping it will make drugs for other neurological conditions more successful.
Gunilla Osswald, BioArctic chief executive, said this year was a “new era” for the company, as it invests in its own drug pipeline and has “a lot of interest from Big Pharma in our brain transporter technology”.
Leqembi was the first drug that slowed the progression of Alzheimer’s, where other treatments could only help reduce symptoms. It was discovered by BioArctic’s founder Lars Lannfelt after a study of the brains of people with Alzheimer’s in a remote Arctic community.
Getting drugs across the barrier into the brain has been one of the hardest problems for treating neurological conditions. Per-Ola Freskgård, BioArctic’s vice-president of science and technology who joined the company from Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, said it had been a “very very big issue in the industry”.
BioArctic’s technology takes advantage of the biochemical process for transporting iron into the brain to deliver drugs. So far, it has evidence that it dramatically increases the delivery of antibody treatments into the brains of animals, but it needs to be tested in humans.
In the deal with Bristol Myers Squibb, BioArctic licensed both the brain transporter and a potential Alzheimer’s treatment, which will probably be in clinical trials in the next two years.
In other partnerships, drugmakers are considering whether they can use the BioArctic technology to revive older drugs that had difficulty entering the brain at all, or which caused unacceptable side effects because of the high dose required to get them across the barrier.
Roche and US biotech Denali Therapeutics are among those working on blood-brain transport technologies.
Osswald said that BioArctic was more financially stable, citing growing royalties from Leqembi. The drug is now approved in 10 markets, though not yet in Europe.
BioArctic reported its fourth-quarter earnings this month. Net revenues were SKr101.2.mn ($9.37mn), up from SKr11mn in the same period the year before. Its operating loss narrowed to SKr53.5mn in the past three months of 2024, compared with a loss of SKr78.1mn the previous year. Shares in the company, which is listed in Sweden, have risen more than 10 per cent in the past year.
