AbbVie punts $1.4 billion to buy early-stage Alzheimer’s drug developer Aliada

US Pharma major AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Aliada Therapeutics, a biotech advancing therapies using a novel blood-brain barrier (BBB)-crossing technology to address challenging central nervous system (CNS) diseases.

Boston, USA-based Aliada's lead investigational asset utilizing this delivery technology, ALIA-1758, is an anti-pyroglutamate amyloid beta (3pE-Aβ) antibody in development for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, in-licensed from Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ). The deal comes months after AbbVie axed its own internal anti-amyloid-beta antibody ABBV-916 after seeing interim Phase II data.

Aliada is advancing therapeutic candidates using its Modular Delivery (MODEL) platform, engineered for high-precision CNS drug delivery. The novel BBB-crossing technology targets transferrin and CD98 receptors (TfR and CD98) which are highly expressed in brain endothelial cells. By engineering highly optimized TfR or CD98 binders, this platform is designed to deliver different types of biological cargoes into the brain, including therapeutic antibodies and genetic medicines such as siRNA.