Salk Strikes License Deal for Vaccine : Pharmaceuticals: Two French firms will pay Immune Response Corp. up to $7.5 million for the right to market its AIDS drug in Europe, Africa and Latin America.
Immune Response Corp., the La Jolla pharmaceutical company co-founded by Jonas Salk that is trying to develop an AIDS vaccine, said Wednesday that it has signed a licensing deal with French vaccine manufacturer Pasteur Vaccins and its parent, Institut Merieux, that could be worth up to $7.5 million over the next three years.
In addition, Immune Response Corp. signed a separate agreement with the two companies making them its principal worldwide manufacturers and suppliers if the vaccine passes clinical trials and is successfully introduced to world markets.
Terms of the agreement give Pasteur the right to market the La Jolla company’s vaccine in Europe, Africa and Latin America, and to conduct and finance clinical trials necessary for approval of the product in those regions. Immune Response Corp. would receive royalty payments from such sales.
North American marketing rights to a successful Immune Response Corp. AIDS vaccine have already been acquired by Rorer Group of Ft. Washington, Pa., owner of a 20% stake in Immune Response Corp. Colgate-Palmolive owns a 12% interest in the company, a strictly passive investment.
Charles Cashion, Immune’s vice president of finance, said Wednesday that Pasteur and Institut Merieux will pay his company up to $7.5 million over a three-year drug development period “if we meet certain approvals and milestones in the vaccine development process.”
The Immune Response Corp. vaccine is an immunotherapeutic drug which, according to a company statement, is “based on an approach first suggested” by Salk. The vaccine is in advanced clinical trials at several U.S. medical centers that the company declined to identify. If the tests are successful, a drug could be introduced to the U.S. market sometime after 1993, Cashion said.
According to Cashion, the drug would be given to patients who have already contracted the HIV virus, the precursor to acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The company says the drug, if successful, would stimulate the patient’s immune response to the virus and prevent the patient’s disease from progressing fully to AIDS.
“We don’t want to go to a point of saying it’s a cure,” Cashion said. “It’s more useful to describe it as an immunotherapeutic that will control but not necessarily eradicate the HIV virus in the infected patients.”
Cashion said the vaccine would act somewhat similarly to the Salk polio vaccine in the way that it induces the body’s immune system to combat the virus.
“With the polio vaccine, the body’s immune system has been exposed to the virus via an earlier vaccine injection. Thus, when you encounter the polio virus itself, the system was primed to deal with it, having had the memory of an earlier experience,” Cashion said.
He acknowledged that competition in the field is intense, with roughly 20 other major drug companies pursuing an AIDS treatment.
Immune Response Corp. filed a registration statement last fall with the Securities and Exchange Commission to hold an initial public stock offering. The offering, which was to have raised more than $38 million, was dropped after the stock market soured in October.
The company said Wednesday it may go through with an initial stock offering sometime over the next year if stock market conditions permit.
Founded in early 1987 by Salk, James Glavin and Dennis Carlo, Immune Response Corp. so far has raised about $20 million through venture capital, licensing and marketing agreements. The company has 31 employees at its Miramar Road-area facilities.
The company also disclosed this week that it plans to move its headquarters from San Diego to a leased 49,000-square-foot facility near Palomar Airport in Carlsbad. Cashion said the company expects its payroll to grow to 54 employees from the existing 31 by the end of this year.
Immune Response Corp. is also attempting to develop treatments for several autoimmune diseases including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and insulin-dependent diabetes.
Salk, whose family owns 5% of Immune Response Corp. stock, developed the company’s AIDS vaccine technology independent of his work at the Salk Institute, a biological research firm he heads in La Jolla. Cashion said Salk has signed over full rights to a successful AIDS vaccine to Immune Response.
Immune Response’s chairman is William Sullivan, who previously was chairman and chief executive of Burroughs Wellcome Co. The board of directors also includes Robert Cawthorn, chairman and chief executive of Rorer Group. Salk is a board member and consultant to the company, but is not a corporate officer.
In December 1989, Institut Merieux became the world’s leading vaccine manufacturer when it bought all the shares of the Canada-based Connaught Biosciences.
