Roche, Alnylam sign deal for $2.8b

Aim to collaborate on new approach to treat hypertension

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals will receive $310 million in cash from the Swiss drug giant Roche Holding AG and be eligible for as much as $2.5 billion more in a deal to jointly develop and market the Cambridge biotech’s novel potential treatment for high blood pressure.

The firms announced on Monday that they will collaborate on Alnylam’s drug candidate, zilebesiran, which is undergoing testing in two mid-stage clinical trials. Unlike approved treatments for hypertension that require patients to take daily pills, the experimental medicine is given as an injection every few months.

A study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine found that zilebesiran’s benefits lasted over 24 weeks in an early-stage trial, raising the possibility that a shot could be administered twice a year. Almost half of patients with high blood pressure aren’t able to lower it to target levels with current medicines, according to the journal.

Yvonne Greenstreet, Alnylam’s chief executive, said her firm developed zilebesiran for millions of patients with high blood pressure who are at high risk for serious cardiovascular disease and early death, including people who have already had a heart attack or stroke. Some may be taking two or three pills for blood pressure daily.

If Alnylam and Roche are successful, the drug has the “potential to be a foundational therapy for all patients with hypertension,” she said in a Globe interview. “We really see this as a game-changing therapy in an area that hasn’t seen any innovation at all.”

More than a billion people worldwide live with hypertension, and, in the United States, about 45 percent of adults have it, according to Alnylam. High blood pressure is the leading cause of cardiovascular disease worldwide, including heart attacks, strokes, and chronic kidney disease, and a major risk for premature death. Despite lifestyle changes and several classes of drugs, Alnylam says on its website, fewer than 20 percent of people with hypertension have it under control.

Teresa Graham, chief executive of

Roche’s pharmaceuticals division, said her company was excited to work with Alnylam and use Roche’s huge global footprint to “further develop and provide this promising therapy with best-in-disease potential to patients.”

Roche, which is based in Basel and dates back to 1896, is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, with nearly 104,000 employees. It is best known for its cancer drugs.

Alnylam was founded in 2002 and has about 2,500 employees.

If the partners succeed in bringing the drug to market, Alnylam and Roche will sell it together in the United States, while Roche will get exclusive rights in the rest of the world.

Joseph Stringer, an analyst for Needham & Company, said in a note to investors that the deal “makes a lot of sense to us, given the significant cost and infrastructure needed to develop and launch in the large hypertension market. We also think the deal terms are favorable to [Alnylam].”

Greenstreet says she expects the results of one mid-stage trial soon and the other by early next year. The two companies would then set up a late-stage trial.

Like five other medicines developed by Alnylam and approved by the Food and Drug Administration since 2018, its hypertension drug relies on RNA interference, or RNAi, to fight disease.

Craig Mello, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and another American scientist won the Nobel Prize in 2006 in medicine or physiology for pioneering research into RNAi.

Anylam’s medicines, which have annual list prices of six figures per patient, work by silencing disease-causing genes in the liver. Most of the drugs treat rare diseases. But in 2020 Alnylam licensed one of the drugs, now sold as Leqvio, to Novartis to treat high cholesterol.

Alnylam is also targeting Alzheimer’s disease. Last week, it announced promising results from a small early-stage trial of its gene-silencing technology to treat early-onset Alzheimer’s, a rare form of the memory-ravaging disease that causes symptoms before the age of 65.