ISTANBUL

AstraZeneca, the British and Swedish joint venture pharmaceutical and biotech company, announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire EsoBiotec, according to a press release by the company on Monday.

The Belgium-based EsoBiotec has accepted AstraZeneca's $1 billion acquisition offer for all of its shares, with $425 million paid upfront.

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of this year, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory clearances.

"EsoBiotec will accelerate and expand the impact of our recent investments and marks a major step forward in realizing our ambition to harness the full potential of cell therapy," said Susan Galbraith, the executive vice president of AstraZeneca.

“We look forward to working with AstraZeneca, a global leader in drug development, to advance our shared goal of bringing transformative cost-effective cell therapies to more patients globally. By combining our expertise and resources, we can accelerate the development of our in vivo platform which has a novel delivery technology we believe will have broad therapeutic applicability," said Jean-Pierre Latere, the CEO of EsoBiotec.

EsoBiotec is a biotechnology company pioneering in vivo cell therapies against cancer that has demonstrated promising early clinical activity.

The EsoBiotec Engineered NanoBody Lentiviral platform empowers the immune system to attack cancer and could offer many more patients access to transformative cell therapy treatments delivered in just minutes rather than the current process which takes weeks.