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Over the past decade, the medicine Enjaymo has been passed around no less than five times by developers large and small. Now it’s trading hands again, through a deal announced Friday.
Sanofi is selling global rights to Enjaymo to the Italy-based drugmaker Recordati, in exchange for an upfront payment of $825 million. And if the medicine hits certain sales goals, Sanofi could take home up to $250 million more.
For Recordati, which specializes in rare diseases, the deal adds a ninth marketed product to the company’s portfolio. Enjaymo is approved in the U.S., Europe and Japan as a treatment for an uncommon type of anemia. In this condition, known as cold agglutinin disease or CAD, the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys some red blood cells. Enjaymo is designed to tamp down that immune response and spare the cells, thereby decreasing the need for red blood cell transfusions.
Enjaymo won U.S. approval in early 2022 after a winding journey. In 2014, the medicine was in development at San Francisco-based iPerian. But that year, Bristol Myers Squibb bought the company for its work in neurodegenerative diseases. iPerian’s programs targeting the immune system were spun out into a new biotechnology firm, True North Therapeutics.
True North wasn’t around for very long, though. By 2017, it had been snapped up by Biogen’s hemophilia-focused spin off Bioverativ. John Cox, the then-CEO of Bioverativ, said at the time that Enjaymo was a central asset in the deal and filled an important gap in the company’s research efforts.
Enjaymo, however, would move to yet another owner in 2018, when Sanofi bought Bioverativ for $11 billion.
Sanofi has turned to dealmaking several times since to further build out its rare disease business. Over the past year alone, the French pharmaceutical giant nabbed rights to an experimental drug for muscular dystrophy and spent $2.2 billion to acquire a biotech and its potential treatment for a rare lung disease.
Sanofi also tried to license a drug for Pompe disease from the startup Maze Therapeutics, but gave up on that deal after facing a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission.
From the Bioverativ acquisition, Sanofi got Enjaymo as well as another now-marketed hemophilia medicine, Altuviiio. According to Recordati, Enjaymo generated around 100 million euros, or roughly $108 million, over the 12-month period between September 2023 and August 2024. The company also expects revenue from the drug to exceed 150 million euros in the 2025 fiscal year, and reach peak annual sales of 250 million to 300 million euros.