In $1.4B Aliada buy, AbbVie sees value in CNS delivery tech, as well as lead asset

AbbVie’s $1.4 billion deal to acquire Aliada will give the pharma a platform to develop new therapies that cross the blood-brain barrier, in addition to the first clinical program using that platform, an anti-amyloid therapy for Alzheimer’s disease.

The acquisition is a rarity among 10-figure biotech deals of the past few years. Since biotech valuations dropped and IPOs became scarce around the beginning of 2022, the vast majority of billion-dollar M&A transactions have delivered the buyers clinically de-risked, later-stage assets or marketed drugs. Aliada Therapeutics Inc., by contrast, entered human testing in 2Q24, and has yet to generate publicly available clinical data...