AstraZeneca, the world's top pharmaceutical company, is nearing the end of its acquisition of Gracell Biologics, a Chinese innovative drug company.
On February 22, Gracell officially announced the completion of the merger agreement with AstraZeneca, after the completion of the merger, Grabit Biotech is no longer a listed company, but a wholly-owned subsidiary of the parent company.
Effective February 22, 2024, New York time, Gracell will suspend ADSS trading on Nasdaq, and the company has required Nasdaq to submit a declaration to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission notifying itself that it will be delisted from Nasdaq, and 10 days after submission, the delisting application will officially take effect.
In addition, in the merger agreement reached late last year, Gracell will receive US$2 per ordinary share (equivalent to US$10 per American Depositary Share (ADS)) in cash, with a cash down payment of approximately US$1 billion. AstraZeneca will also pay 0.0 cash per common share if the drug developed reaches certain regulatory-related milestones$3 (equivalent to about $1 per ADS.)US$5), which adds up to a total of $1.2 billion.
Founded in 2017, Gracell is committed to developing innovative and efficient cells**. It was listed on the NASDAQ on January 8, 2021, when the IPO price was as high as $19. However, Gracell Biotech's pipeline is still in the early clinical stage and still needs continuous blood transfusion, and after the honeymoon period with investors in the early stage of listing, the company's stock price has been continuously **, and the stock price was once close to the risk of delisting of $1.
Gracell's core product, GC012F, is a CAR-T cell**, which needs to be extracted from the patient's own immune T cells, cultured in vitro and genetically modified, so that they can target and attack pathogenic cells, and then infused back into the patient's body to accurately ** the tumor. This kind of ** is personalized**, limited by the cost of production, ** expenses are extremely expensive. Gracell has built three self-built technology platforms, among which the FastCar platform based on GC012F can greatly improve cell production efficiency and significantly reduce production costs. The program is in a series of clinical trials to explore its efficacy in multiple myeloma, B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma and systemic lupus erythematosus.
As for Gracell's deal with AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical industry generally believes that it has opened up a new exit path for domestic biomedical primary market investors. Recently, the cold domestic biomedical investment and financing may be related to factors such as the suspension of IPOs, the large fluctuations in the performance of the secondary market, and the lack of stable exit channels for funds in the primary market.