Merck & Co buys VelosBio for $2.75 billion

5 November 2020

Some six months on from its last acquisition, US pharma giant Merck & Co (NYSE: MRK) has announced that it is to acquire VelosBio for $2.75 billion.

San Diego-based VelosBio is a privately held clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company committed to developing cancer therapies targeting receptor tyrosine kinase-like orphan receptor 1 (ROR1).

"At Merck, we continue to bolster our growing oncology pipeline with strategic acquisitions"VelosBio’s lead candidate is VLS-101, an antibody-drug conjugate targeting ROR1 that is currently being evaluated in a Phase I and a Phase II trial for the treatment of patients with hematologic malignancies and solid tumors, respectively.

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