June 22 Quick Takes: Quick exit for Kurma as uniQure buys Corlieve; plus Merck, TRexBio, Halozyme-ViiV and more

Kurma Partners and fellow seed investors have gained an early exit via the acquisition of Corlieve Therapeutics S.A.S. by uniQure N.V. (NASDAQ:QURE) for €46.3 million ($55.1 million) up front plus up to €203.7 million ($242.5 million) in milestones. The deal comes less than two years after Kurma, CEO Richard Porter, Valerie Crepel and Christophe Mulle founded the Paris-based company to pursue therapies for severe neurological disorders. Corlieve’s lead gene therapy, which will be named AMT-260, delivers miRNA targeting kainate receptors in the hippocampus to treat temporal lobe epilepsy. uniQure has a pipeline of gene replacement gene therapies, but it’s also developing the next-generation miQURE gene silencing platform that delivers miRNA using adeno-associated viral (AAV) vectors. Kurma seeded Corlieve in November 2020 with an undisclosed amount in conjunction with Eurazeo’s Idinvest Partners and Pureos Bioventures. Porter will continue to lead Corlieve as general manager of the uniQure’s new unit. 

The PD-1 march into earlier lines of treatment continues with an overall survival and progression-free survival benefit for Keytruda pembrolizumab from Merck & Co. Inc. (NYSE:MRK) in first-line ovarian cancer. The anti-PD-1 mAb plus chemotherapy, with or without bevacizumab, met the two primary endpoints in the Phase III KEYNOTE-826 trial that enrolled 617 patients with persistent, recurrent or metastatic cervical cancer, making it the first PD-1 blocker to show a survival benefit in the population. KEYNOTE-826 study also serves as a confirmatory trial for the drug’s accelerated approval in second-line recurrent or metastatic cervical cancer...