Johnson & Johnson said Monday it will purchase the startup Firefly Bio for $1 billion in an effort to expand its work in the suddenly buzzy field of KRAS inhibitors.
The deal comes less than two months after Revolution Medicines showed that a KRAS-targeted drug could nearly double survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer, one of the most intractable tumors known to medicine.
KRAS has long been in the sights of drug developers, because mutant forms of the gene and protein are found in around 30% of all tumors. But before Revolution Medicines, companies had struggled to find molecules that could latch on to and shut down a protein. Chemists compared the protein to a “greasy ball.”
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