Novelty Nobility, a Korean company specializing in antibody new drug development, said on Monday that its U.S. partner, ValenzaBio, was acquired by Acelyrin on Jan. 5.

The acquisition is expected to help the clinical development of its autoimmune disease treatment candidate, NN2802, Novelty Nobility said.

In February last year, Novelty Nobility transferred NN2802, a pre-IND anti-c-KIT being studied as a treatment option in chronic urticaria, to ValenzaBio for a total of $733.25 million (approximately 880 billion won). NN2802 is a candidate for the anti-c-KIT antibody-based best-in-class treatment that can be used to treat autoimmune diseases induced by mast cells and has an estimated market opportunity of around $2.5 billion.

Chronic urticaria also called hives is a skin reaction that causes itchy welts to appear on the skin and usually last for more than six weeks and can return often over months or years, causing discomfort.

Through the acquisition of ValenzaBio, Acelyrin has also added a candidate substance for thyroid eye disease, lonigutamab (VB-421), to its pipeline which is currently in phase 1 trials. 

Acelyrin is a Los Angeles-based company specializing in the development of inflammatory and immune disease treatments like its novel interleukin-17A (IL-17A) inhibitor, Izokibep, currently in phase 3 trials. Founder and CEO Lin Shao-Lee is a former head of Horizon Therapeutics laboratory and has served as an inflammatory and immune disease executive at multinational pharmaceutical companies such as AbbVie, Gilead, and Amgen.

"Acelyrin's disease expertise, stable financing ability, and abundant clinical development experience are difficult to find in unlisted Biotech, and we hope to more effectively conduct clinical trials for the development of NN2802 (XLRN-517) through cooperation with Acelyrin in the future," said Novelty Nobility CEO Park Sang-gyu.