He credits the support of the nonprofit Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and the state-funded California Institute for Regenerative Medicine with funding Forty Seven’s early clinical research and development. Determining which CD47-blocking antibodies worked best was risky. The wrong type or dosage could be toxic, even deadly for cells.
Biotechs saw it as too dicey to invest at an early stage, Weissman said. So he and Majeti formed Forty Seven, with Stanford getting an equity stake and future royalties that it agreed to share with the state.
Stanford’s payout from the sale is $67.1 million. Other winners from the deal include billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Family Office and the Rockefeller family’s venture capital firm Venrock Associates. The entities, which own stakes of 0.8% and 1.2%, respectively, acquired their holdings in the last quarter of 2019, filings show, when the shares traded for as low as $5.53 and as high as $45.39.
“Once you’ve made a fundamental discovery, it’s heartbreaking to see possible therapeutics not making it to market because of the judgment of money people who don’t see the benefits in terms of profit exceeding costs and risks,” Weissman said. “Business people are constrained, of course, I don’t fault them at all.”
“The real problem is federal and state governments didn’t realize we had to pick up the ball between discovery and therapy,” he said. “You could say Forty Seven’s purchase price is a demonstration even to the money people that you can create value.”
Gilead announced Monday it will acquire Forty Seven for $95.50 a share, almost double its closing price the preceding Thursday, before Bloomberg News reported on the potential for a deal. Co-founder Majeti’s stake is worth about $120 million.
Forty Seven is the fourth company started by Weissman, who also served on the founding scientific advisory board of Amgen Inc.
He said he intends to make himself available to Gilead to advise on Forty Seven’s treatments and hopes research will continue for other potential applications such as treating scleroderma and fatty liver disease.
His next project will put him back in the lab. Weissman said he wants to gather funding and refocus on research he started decades ago that involved extracting, purifying and transplanting blood-forming stem cells in patients with aggressive breast cancer.
He formed a company to commercialize the treatment and sold it and the patents to Sandoz, now a unit of Novartis AG, in the early 1990s. The research stalled and Novartis shuttered the program in 2000.