BioCentury
ARTICLE | Strategy

Committing to covalency

Avila gives Celgene a new discovery platform as well as complement to Revlimid

January 30, 2012 8:00 AM UTC

After building a business by combining in-house discovery with early stage licensing deals and opportunistic later-stage M&A, Celgene Corp.'s plan to buy Avila Therapeutics Inc. marks its first acquisition of a small molecule discovery platform in over a decade. The deal also brings in AVL-292, a Phase I program for B cell malignancies to complement Celgene's blockbuster Revlimid lenalidomide.

Celgene has not brought in a new small molecule drug discovery capability since 2000, when it bought Signal Pharmaceuticals Inc. for a discovery platform based on intracellular signaling and gene and protein regulation. Instead, the company has been feeding its early stage pipeline from in-house discovery, plus a variety of licensing and option deals for earlier-stage assets (see BioCentury, July 3, 2000). ...