Pharming Group Acquires Rare Disease Candidates in TRM SASU Liquidation
Dutch biotech company, Pharming Group announced a half million euro deal ($667,000), acquiring assets from the French company, Transgenic Rabbit Models (TRM) SASU, liquidation. This deal gives Pharming Group access to five recombinant human product candidates for the treatment of rare genetic disorders: Pompe’s disease, Fabry’s disease, Gaucher’s disease, and Hemophilia A and B.
In addition to the product leads, Pharming gains access to TRM’s expertise and transgenic rabbit founder technology, an offset to Pharming’s existing FDA and EMA validated technology platform. According to Bruno Giannetti, COO of Pharming, this acquisition will strengthen existing projects and accelerate the company’s ability to develop additional products.
Pharming announced that they intended to open a French research group which will advance these products further towards potential clinical assessments. Additionally, this French research group will be able to use the transgenic rabbit models to discover new potential recombinant human product candidates.
Sijmen de Vries, Pharming’s CEO, commented that these new assets “could go some way towards fulfilling our vision in developing innovative products for the treatment of unmet medical needs in rare diseases.”
The TRM deal follows Pharming’s 2013 partnership with Shanghai Institute for Pharmaceutical Industry (SIPI), which uses Pharming’s development platform for the collaborative manufacturing of new treatments for Haemophilia-A.
Bruno Gianetti, COO of Pharming said in a statement, that through this most recent deal with TRM, “We will not only be able to strengthen our Factor VIII project with SIPI by adding an additional source of founder rabbits, but also to accelerate, by possibly as much as two years, our ability to develop additional products in therapeutic areas where our technology platform is particularly efficient — the development of treatments for rare genetic and life-threatening diseases …that require the complex proteins that continue to pose serious technical and cost challenges to cell based production methods.”