AbbVie has agreed to acquire a young company with drugmaking technology from Johnson & Johnson and an experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s disease that’s in the first stage of human testing. The deal, announced Monday, is expected to close by the end of the year, and has AbbVie buying all the outstanding shares of Aliada Therapeutics for $1.4 billion in cash. A private company, Aliada formed in 2021 with seed funding from J&J’s venture arm and the investment firm RA Capital Management. Aliada has a license to a technology J&J scientists created to get drugs across a kind of biological shield that protects the central nervous system. This “blood-brain barrier” is extremely selective about what molecules are allowed to pass through it, and has long been a major obstacle for brain drug developers. Over the past couple years, large companies like Roche, Biogen and Eisai have licensed tools or medicines meant to overcome this obstacle. AbbVie has marked neuroscience as a “key growth area,” and said in a statement that Aliada’s platform will “enhance discovery and development efforts” there. The technology functions somewhat like a Trojan horse, taking potential medicines that would normally be shut out from the nervous system and attaching them to “delivery molecules.” The carriers are designed to then bind to proteins that can ferry the cargo across the blood-brain barrier.

Full report : AbbVie makes $1.4 billion acquisition of J&J backed Aliada Therapeutics researching a clinical-stage Alzheimer’s medicine and a drugmaking technology that may be useful for a variety of brain diseases.