Prime Medicine is cutting its pipeline, but gaining a partner.
The gene editing company, which once boasted a pipeline of 18 programs, is now focusing on five, including a new T cell collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb that comes with $110 million to start, Prime announced Monday morning. The remaining programs include treatments for chronic granulomatous disease — a genetic immune disease that makes people highly susceptible to infections — Wilson disease and cystic fibrosis.
With the Bristol Myers deal, Prime will get a $55 million upfront payment and a $55 million equity investment from the pharma company. Prime could receive more than $3.5 billion in milestones down the line. The duo is developing ex vivo cell therapies with gene editing for immunological diseases and cancer. As a result of the deal and the pipeline cuts, Prime now expects its cash runway to last into the first half of 2026.
In an interview, Prime CEO Keith Gottesdiener said that the deal is “the first big gene editing deal for a number of years,” but noted that the pipeline cuts came as the company faced an “outside environment where the cost of capital became really quite expensive relative to where we were back in ’20 and ’21.”
“It became clear we were going to have to focus,” he said. Gottesdiener also said he expects deals to be key to the company’s business moving forward.
Prime’s stock ($PRME} was up about 16% Monday morning.
The pipeline slim-down comes as one of Prime’s key competitors, Tome Biosciences, laid off almost all employees in August and said it was seeking a sale or partner. Both companies have touted ambitions to develop a form of editing that could make changes to broad swaths of genetic code. Prime, which was founded by Broad Institute gene editing pioneer David Liu, calls its version of that technology PASSIGE.
Other gene editing companies, including Arbor Biotechnologies, Tessera Therapeutics and Beam Therapeutics, have all cut staff in the past 12 months.
Gottesdiener did not answer specifically whether Prime was going to lay off staff, though he said that “we don’t really expect any significant changes to the company as a result of these announcements.” He added that Prime runs a “very, very lean operation” and the company has not grown for at least a year and a half.
Prime’s leaner pipeline includes its lead asset for a specific mutation of chronic granulomatous disease (CGD) called p47phox, which the company put into clinical studies earlier this year. It’s also developing a follow-on program for the X-linked version of the disease using the PASSIGE technology. Gottesdiener said that he hopes the experimental treatment for X-linked CGD can be tested in the same study as its currently open CGD trial, though he declined to provide a timeline for when the follow-on program is expected to enter the clinic.
As part of the BMS partnership, Prime will design prime editors for Bristol Myers, including with PASSIGE. “Is PASSIGE ready for prime time — pun intended? The answer is absolutely yes. Our work in T cells is essentially ready to move into true therapeutic options,” Gottesdiener said.
When asked about the struggles in the broader gene editing market, Gottesdiener said: “In this environment where people are really thinking about ‘what have you done for me, yesterday or today,’ gene editing has suffered a little bit because it’s a new modality moving towards the clinic, and the amount of validation studies that have been done are still small.
“I really don’t like the idea that people are worried that the hype has disappeared,” he said. “Now the valuations have disappeared. I do agree with that.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated throughout with more background on Prime Medicine and comments from CEO Keith Gottesdiener.