Ligand to acquire Crystal Bioscience

US drugmaker Ligand Pharmaceutical has entered into an agreement to acquire Crystal Biosciences, a leader in avian genetics and the generation of fully-human therapeutic antibodies.

Under the terms of the agreement, Ligand will pay Crystal shareholders $25 million in cash at closing, up to an additional $10.5 million of success-based milestones, and revenue sharing from existing licensees for a defined period.

Crystal is a leader in the difficult-to-address-epitope area of antibody research with its HuMab technology, which is believed to be the world’s only chicken-based human antibody platform to successfully generate human antibodies. As part of the OmniAb brand, HuMab technology will be called OmniChicken. Because of the evolutionary distance between birds and mammals, chickens enable the generation of novel antibodies against targets that are not immunogenic in mammals like mice and rats, the core species of Ligand’s existing OmniAb platform. The addition of the OmniChicken platform will be complementary to Ligand’s OmniAb technology, and further solidifies Ligand’s position as the world leader in novel, transgenic antibody discovery platforms.