Roche’s Small Deal Has Big Cancer Promise
A licensing arrangement with closely held Adaptive Biotechnologies offers a path to groundbreaking customized treatments.
Using sequencing to find new treatments.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
When it comes to this month’s dealmaking in biotech, the record $74 billion takeover of Celgene Inc. by Bristol-Myers Squibb & Co. has been the focus of attention. A smaller transaction that came around the same time deserves more notice than it got.
The deal, announced on Jan. 4, is a licensing agreement reached between Roche Holding AG’s Genentech unit and closely held Adaptive Biotechnologies, and it’s potentially worth more than $2.3 billion before royalties. Compared with other such arrangements — Bloomberg Intelligence counted 456 licensing deals last year — this one is on the bigger side, and more ambitious.