AUTL - Autolus Therapeutics to get $70M in milestone payments from Blackstone Life Sciences

• Autolus Therapeutics ( NASDAQ: AUTL ) on Thursday said it would get $70M over two milestone payments from private investment platform Blackstone Life Sciences.
• AUTL and Blackstone in Nov. last year had entered into a collaboration and financing deal under which Blackstone agreed to give AUTL up to $250M in equity and product financing.
• The financing was to support the development of AUTL's investigational CAR-T cell therapy obe-cel.
• On Thursday, AUTL in a separate press release said that an interim analysis of a phase 2 trial of obe-cel for the treatment of a type of blood cancer had found that the study met its main goal.
• "The first Blackstone milestone of $35m is being paid earlier than anticipated as a result of the joint steering committee’s review of Autolus' interim analysis of pivotal FELIX Phase 2 clinical trial of obe-cel in relapsed/refractory adult Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL)," AUTL said in a statement .
• The second Blackstone $35M milestone is a pre-agreed milestone based upon the performance and qualification of AUTL's obe-cel manufacturing process.

For further details see: