Brii Biosciences Ltd., a biotechnology company developing therapies to improve patient health and choice across diseases with high unmet medical needs, announced that it has entered into an agreement with VBI Vaccines, Inc. and certain of its subsidiaries and its creditor K2 VBI Equity Trust, LLC and K2 HealthVentures LLC, acquiring the intellectual property (IP) and other assets relating to BRII-179.

Under the agreement, the company will fully acquire the BRII-179 patents, BRII-179 know-how, and relevant BRII-179 materials, eliminating all future milestones and royalty obligations payable to VBI.

The total consideration to be paid by Brii is USD 18 million. Upon the closing of this transaction, Brii and VBI will also terminate their agreements announced on February 14, 2024, which were not consummated due to the discontinuation of operations of VBI. All payment obligations of Brii under the terminated agreements other than the outstanding principal amount of USD 2.5 million in the form of a promissory note will be cancelled, the company informed in a statement.

Dr. Zhi Hong, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Brii Bio stated, “This transaction ensures us with uninterrupted clinical supply of BRII-179 and complete ownership of its IP. It vests more value of BRII-179 in Brii's shareholders as we advance to late-stage development.”

Currently, Brii has started several BRII-179-containing combination studies to pursue its strategy of achieving a higher functional cure rate for the patients with chronic Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) infection.

Ongoing studies continue to support that BRII-179 has the potential to identify HBV patients more responsive to curative treatments. Based on the cumulative and emerging data, a large, prospective and confirmatory Phase 2b study evaluating sequential treatment of BRII-179 followed by elebsiran and PEG-IFNα combination (the ENRICH study) is now fully enrolled.