Gowling WLG won this year’s LB Award for Life Sciences Team of the Year for its role in advising AstraZeneca on a collaboration and license agreement with biopharmaceutical company Quell Therapeutics worth more than £2bn. LB spoke with two of the partners who worked on the deal to discuss why it’s important and what it means for the team.
Ranked by the BioIndustry Association as the largest UK licensing deal of 2023, the £2bn-plus agreement will see the two companies work together on the development, manufacturing, and commercialisation of a novel engineered T-regulatory (Treg) cell therapy to treat type 1 diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease.
AstraZeneca paid Quell Therapeutics $85m upfront in a combination of cash and equity investment, with further payment of up to $2bn contingent on milestones. The deal also allows an option for Quell and AstraZeneca to co-develop Treg cell therapies in the US in the future.
‘Apart from being one of the largest UK licensing deals, cell therapy is an exciting new development in the sector with great potential to help treat some diseases that are currently untreatable or have existing treatments with limited efficacy’, said Gowling life sciences co-head Patrick Duxbury.
He added: ‘like any transaction of this type, it’s in the hope it will deliver new and effective treatments for diseases such as autoimmune conditions that currently lack satisfactory options and will provide real change for patients.’
The firm’s private equity team head Ian Piggin also worked on the deal, which he described as ‘a complex deal with novel technology that required specific expertise from the whole team working on it to deliver the successful outcome for AstraZeneca.’
AstraZeneca has been a key client of Gowling’s for over a decade, and the firm’s earlier work for the company includes advising on a collaboration agreement for the development and distribution of the University of Oxford’s recombinant adenovirus Covid-19 vaccine, as well as on a $6.9bn cancer drug collaboration and antibody drug conjugate agreement with Daiichi Sankyo.
Now, the team hopes that the agreement will help enable further activity in the growing cell therapy space – and that its experience here will leave Gowling well positioned to do more work in the space. ‘As technologies such as cell therapy develop, you are constantly learning and adapting to the application of the law accordingly’, said Duxbury. ‘We are using this transaction as a case study and ensuring we conduct due diligence to not overlook any aspects that might significantly impact the transaction.’
He concluded by underscoring the broader significance of such agreements: ‘Deals like these typically act as a catalyst for others to follow and gain momentum, which I expect will be the case following this agreement.’
The Gowling team that advised AstraZeneca was led by UK life sciences co-heads Jenny Davies and Patrick Duxbury, and included corporate partner Ian Piggin.