Lantheus, maker of a broad range of diagnostics, therapeutics and artificial intelligence-powered platforms, is adding another radiopharmaceutical to its collection.
The Massachusetts-based company has acquired Cerveau Technologies, it announced this week. Cerveau’s flagship product is the MK-6240 positron emission tomography imaging agent, which is used to pinpoint accumulating neurofibrillary tangles of tau, a protein found in brain cells that has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease.
The exact financial terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed. However, Lantheus said in its announcement that the stock-based deal would comprise not just an upfront payment, but also additional payouts as Cerveau’s business hits certain development and commercial milestones, as well as “double-digit royalty payments” based on earnings from Cerveau’s research and commercial work.
In its most recent earnings report (PDF), which was published in November and summed up the third quarter of 2022, Lantheus predicted that its full-year revenues would clock in between $915 million and $919 million, about $20 million above the midpoint of its original forecasts for the year.
Since announcing the acquisition at the start of this week, Lantheus’ stock has stayed virtually steady. Though it dropped in the first hours of trading on Tuesday morning—down about $1.50 from Monday’s closing price of $60.02—it has since recovered and was hovering around $60.30 as of Wednesday morning.
Cerveau’s MK-6240 tracer—which was exclusively licensed from Merck in early 2017—is used in PET scans to highlight areas of the brain that appear to have build-ups of tau, potentially indicating the onset of Alzheimer’s.
Because tau tangles begin to accumulate before the commonly recognized outward symptoms of Alzheimer’s begin to appear, using Cerveau’s tracer could help diagnose the disease well ahead of the typical timeline. The PET tracer can also be used to track the progression of the disease in patients who have already been diagnosed.
Cerveau has tied up partnerships with many pharma and biotech companies and academic institutions, with an aim of applying MK-6240 to ongoing clinical trials of new treatments for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative conditions. In September, for one, it inked a deal with Alnylam Pharmaceuticals to help evaluate the latter’s novel therapeutics for mild cognitive impairment and pre-symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease.
MK-6240 also played a role in the validation process for Biogen and Eisai’s controversial Alzheimer’s treatment Aduhelm. According to the FDA’s labeling information (PDF) for the drug, the PET tracer was used to track tau tangles in substudies of 37 patients, in which it showed that a high dose of Aduhelm was more successful than a placebo in reducing the protein’s prevalence in three of six studied regions of the brain.
The acquisition of Cerveau comes not long after Lantheus offered around $2 billion to license two radiopharmaceutical oncology candidates from POINT Biopharma. The deal—which was announced in November and closed a month later—saw Lantheus shell out $260 million up front, while pledging another $1.8 billion-plus royalties if POINT’s pair of assets are approved by the FDA and begin to reach certain commercial milestones.