Cooley and Covington & Burling have scored roles in AstraZeneca's $1bn acquisition of Belgian cancer treatment company EsoBiotec. 

Covington is guiding AstraZeneca, marking the latest instance in a run of deals work for the company as it continues to expand its global operations. 

Meantime Cooley is acting for EsoBiotec, with the team led by London partners Russell Anderson (M&A) and Simon Amies (life sciences), and San Diego partners Rama Padmanabhan (M&A), Rowook Park (M&A) and Charity Williams (licensing transactions). 

The deal includes an initial payment of $425m at closing and up to $575m more dependent on EsoBiotec hitting "development and regulatory milestones". 

EsoBiotec is a small privately held firm focused on making a type of cancer treatment known as CAR-T cell therapy cheaper and much quicker. Currently the treatment, which uses a patient's own immune system to recognise and destroy cancer, requires T-cells to be harvested and modified outside the body before being reinfused weeks later, which can cost up to £400,000 per patient. 

EsoBiotec's approach is to make the therapy an off-the-shelf product that can be administered with a simple injection by engineering immune cells directly within the patient's body. Its treatment uses targeted viruses to deliver genetic instructions to specific immune cells, such as T-cells, which program them to recognise and destroy cancerous cells. 

Susan Galbraith, the executive vice-president of oncology research and development at AstraZeneca, told the Guardian the company had negotiated the deal quickly after seeing EsoBiotec present data from its first patient at JP Morgan’s healthcare conference in San Francisco in January. 

“We believe it has the potential to transform cell therapy and will enable us to scale these innovative treatments," Galbraith added. 

AstraZeneca has grown to become the largest company listed on the London Stock Exchange, with a market capitalisation of around $185bn. Covington has guided a number of the Cambridge-based company's past acquisitions, including its $2.1bn purchase of Spanish pharma company Almirall's respiratory business back in 2014.  

In 2023 a Covington team led by Washington DC-based corporate partner Mark Riella also advised AstraZeneca on its $1.8bn purchase of US biopharma company CinCor. A Cooley team headed by Padmanabhan and Park acted for CinCor on the deal. 

Later that year Padmanabhan and Park again led when Cooley advised China’s Gracell Biotechnologies in its $1.2bn acquisition by AstraZeneca, in a deal that brought the company a cell therapy programme for multiple myeloma. 

AstraZeneca has also regularly turned to Freshfields for high-value deals work, including the Gracell deal and its largest acquisition to date – the $39bn buy of US rare disease drug developer Alexion in 2020. Alexion was repped on the deal by Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz and Macfarlanes on the UK aspects. 

The EsoBiotec transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2025. EsoBiotec will become a wholly owned subsidiary of AstraZeneca, with operations in Belgium.