Celgene Pays Acceleron $25M up front under anaemia drug partnership

Celgene is paying privately held Acceleron Pharma $25 million up front under a deal to jointly develop and commercialise ACE-536, a ligand trap that inhibits members of the transforming growth factor- (TGF) beta "superfamily" involved in the late stages of erythropoiesis – the process of generating red blood cells – as a treatment for anaemia.

Acceleron stands to gain an additional $217 million in milestones under the collaboration, which is the second partnership it has formed with Summit, New Jersey-based Celgene, with the first involving another of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech's experimental anaemia products, ACE-011 (sotatercept), a soluble receptor fusion protein comprised of extracellular domain of the human activin receptor type IIA fused to human