Dive Brief:
- Aprinoia Therapeutics, a biotech with an Alzheimer’s disease drug in late-stage testing, plans to go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, founded by former U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
- The combination of Aprinoia and the SPAC, Ross Acquisition Corp II, will result in a company called Aprinoia Therapeutics Holdings Ltd with an enterprise value of as much as roughly $320 million. Existing Aprinoia shareholders will roll all of their stock into the new holding company and will own between 42% and 74% of it, according to the announcement Wednesday.
- The two companies expect to complete the merger in the first half of this year and list shares on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange. As part of the transaction, the Ross SPAC will issue $280 million of stock. Aprinoia will receive the remaining proceeds in the SPAC trust account plus additional capital from Wilbur Ross and other investors.
Dive Insight:
SPAC activity has become rarer amid a slumping market for new biotech stock offerings. There were just 74 de-SPAC deals in the first nine months of 2022, compared with 161 in the same period in 2021, according to a report from White & Case.
Ross, who served under former President Donald Trump, cited Aprinoia’s work in Alzheimer’s as a compelling draw for his acquisition company. “It became clear that this was a problem worth our attention,” Ross said in the companies’ release.
Aprinoia will use the proceeds from the transaction to advance its experimental medicines, led by a prospect called APN-1607.
APN-1607 isn’t an anti-amyloid drug like Leqembi or Aduhelm, the two Alzheimer’s medicines the Food and Drug Administration has recently approved. The experimental treatment instead acts on a different protein, tau, that accumulates in patients’ brains and has drawn interest from drugmakers and researchers in recent years. Ross noted that APN-1607 is “potentially complementary” to drugs like Leqembi.
The drug is currently under evaluation as an Alzheimer’s disease treatment in a Phase 3 clinical trial in China and a Phase 2 study in the U.S., Japan and Taiwan. Aprinoia is also waiting for regulatory approval to start a Phase 3 U.S. trial of the medicine in patients with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.
Separately, Aprinoia announced that it’s licensed the Chinese rights to APN-1607 to a “large pharmaceutical company” that hopes to bring the drug to the market in China in 2024. As part of the licensing deal, Aprinoia will receive an upfront payment of about $10 million and is eligible for milestone payments and royalties in the future.