Goldfinch Bio, a Cambridge biotech startup seeking to develop precision medicines for people with kidney disease, will receive at least $109 million in a business deal with the California biopharma giant Gilead Sciences.
It’s the first major business deal cut by Goldfinch since the privately held company was created in 2016 by the Boston venture capital firm Third Rock Ventures.
Under the agreement scheduled to be announced Wednesday, Goldfinch will receive $55 million upfront and another guaranteed $54 million. The cash will support Goldfinch’s program of using genomic data to develop treatments for kidney disease, both common and rare.
Goldfinch, which has 38 employees but is expected to grow, is eligible to receive up to $1.95 billion in additional payments if its first five drug development programs with Gilead bear fruit.
Dr. Tony Johnson, chief executive of Goldfinch, cited a “massive unmet need” for new treatments for kidney disease, which he said about 11 percent of Americans have and accounts for $80 billion a year in medical costs.
Goldfinch plans to gather genomic data on tens of thousands of patients.
John Sundy, a senior vice president at Gilead overseeing clinical research, sounded a similar theme.
“Gilead is focused foremost on serious diseases with high unmet medical need, and there is no better example of this than chronic kidney disease,” he said.
Gilead is one of the nation’s largest biopharma companies. It has focused primarily on developing and selling antiviral drugs used in the treatment of HIV, hepatitis, and the flu.
In 2013, Gilead vaulted to the front ranks of drug companies with the debut of Sovaldi, a revolutionary hepatitis C therapy that cured many patients and generated billions of dollars in sales. Gilead soon launched another hepatitis C treatment, Harvoni, also a blockbuster.
The drugs were remarkably successful at curing patients of hepatitis C — maybe too successful for Gilead’s own good. As the number of hepatitis C patients fell, Gilead grappled with declining sales and profits. It also drew criticism for the cost of the drugs.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey warned Gilead in 2016 that the prices of the two hepatitis C medicines — Sovaldi, which costs $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment, and Harvoni, which costs $94,500 for a treatment regimen — “may constitute an unfair trade practice in violation of Massachusetts law” because they were too expensive for many patients.
Healey later reached a deal with Gilead to provide rebates for the care of some hepatitis C patients covered by MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program.
Gilead, which is publicly traded, has cut a number of business deals with Massachusetts-based biotechs in recent years. Last year, the company agreed to pay the Cambridge-based startup Tango Therapeutics $50 million upfront to collaborate on developing a new generation of targeted cancer therapies.
In 2016, Gilead bought a drug discovery subsidiary of Cambridge-based Nimbus Therapeutics in a deal valued at up to $1.2 billion. The subsidiary, Nimbus Apollo, was working on treatments for liver diseases.
Gilead also signed deals in 2015 and 2017 with Spring Bank Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Hopkinton to collaborate on potential hepatitis B treatments. Gilead also announced a collaboration in 2017 with X-Chem, a Waltham biotech using a new drug-discovery approach.
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.