This just might be a case of buying the whole cow, when perhaps only buying a few gallons — of the milk — would have sufficed.

But if the CAR-T KLN-1010 “milk” candidate is as good as advertised, this may have been the only deal Kelonia management would accept: “buy the whole cow” — and get the BCMA targeting goods, along with it. That is, the Kelonia team may well have been in a position of strength, and the perhaps as much as ~$7 billion price tag reflects it. Here’s the latest, from Fierce:

…Eli Lilly is picking up its second in vivo CAR-T company of the year, paying $3.25 billion in upfront cash for Kelonia Therapeutics and its phase 1-stage myeloma therapy.

Kelonia is a lentiviral vector delivery specialist [with a] lead program [that] BCMA-target[s] in vivo CAR-T. [The candidate is dubbed] KLN-1010 [by Kelonia]….

The Boston-based biotech read out a slice of data from a phase 1 trial in relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma last year that demonstrated a 100% minimal residual disease-negative response rate in the first four patients evaluated….

Wow — that’s a small data set — yet, $7 billion? I gather Lilly’s CAR-T shopping spree, in the oncology suite, continues apace [and spending some of that GLP-1 blockbuster revenue]. Smile — onward, into the sunshine in the steel and glass canyons, now.

नमस्ते