BRIEF—Merck & Co buys Immune Design for $300 million

Merck & Co has announced a deal to buy a company because of its potential to “meaningfully improve vaccine development.”

The US pharma giant is to buy Immune Design (Nasdaq: IMDZ), a California-based late-stage immunotherapy company employing next-generation in vivo approaches to enable the body's immune system to fight disease, for $300 million.

Immune Design’s technologies, GLAAS and ZVex, are engineered to activate the immune system's natural ability to generate or expand antigen-specific cytotoxic immune cells to fight cancer and other chronic diseases.

Roger Perlmutter, president, Merck Research Laboratories, said: “Scientists at Immune Design have established a unique portfolio of approaches to cancer immunization and adjuvant systems designed to enhance the ability of a vaccine to protect against infection, which could meaningfully improve vaccine development.”