Novartis to buy Imperial-Crick spinout Myricx Bio for up to $1.5 billion

Why it matters

Myricx Bio shows how quickly pharma will buy platform biology when the mechanism addresses a bottleneck, even before clinical proof is public.

Novartis agreed on July 6th to acquire Myricx Bio for up to $1.5 billion, giving the Swiss drugmaker a London oncology startup built around a new payload chemistry for antibody-drug conjugates, or ADCs. Reuters reported that Novartis will pay $1.1 billion upfront, plus as much as $400 million in milestone payments, and expects the deal to close in the second half of 2026.

For co-founders Ed Tate, Roberto Solari and Andrew Bell, the deal is a fast exit from a piece of academic chemistry that began as N-myristoyltransferase, or NMT, research at Imperial College London and the Francis Crick Institute. Myricx Bio said in its July 6th announcement that Novartis is acquiring two lead ADC assets and a NMT inhibitor payload platform aimed at solid tumors, with lead assets directed at B7-H3 and HER2.

The headline number needs care. The $1.5 billion price is an earnout ceiling. The cash locked in at close is $1.1 billion, with $400 million dependent on milestones that Myricx Bio and Novartis have not publicly detailed. For a company still described by Myricx Bio as preclinical, the upfront payment is the part of the deal that matters most: Novartis is buying the platform before human proof of concept is in hand.

From lab target to ADC payload

Myricx Bio started in 2019 as Myricx Pharma, raising GBP 4.5 million in seed financing from Sofinnova Partners and Brandon Capital. At launch, the focus was small-molecule inhibitors of human NMT in cancer. Tate, then chief scientific officer, had built a career around NMT biology and chemistry; Bell brought decades of Pfizer medicinal chemistry experience and was a co-inventor of sildenafil; Solari had been involved with Astex and Heptares and served as the startup's founding CEO.

That origin matters because the exit Novartis is buying is the result of a pivot. In its July 2024 financing release, Myricx Bio said Robin Carr, who joined from GSK in 2019 and later became CEO before moving to CTO, had led the company's shift from NMT inhibitors as small-molecule drugs toward NMT inhibitors as ADC payloads. ADCs pair an antibody that homes in on a tumor-associated antigen with a toxic payload designed to kill the target cell. Payload choice is one of the hard constraints in the field: enough potency to kill cancer cells can come with tolerability problems, and resistance can narrow the commercial runway of a drug class.

Myricx Bio's claim is that NMT inhibition gives its ADCs an orthogonal payload mechanism compared with commonly used topoisomerase-1 and tubulin inhibitor payloads. The company says its preclinical work has shown efficacy and tolerability across multiple solid tumor-associated antigens and cancer cell types. Those are company-supplied, preclinical claims, so they should be read as the scientific rationale for the acquisition rather than clinical validation.

A venture round that bought speed

The deal also marks a clear venture return path for a European biotech formed around university science. In July 2024, Myricx Bio raised GBP 90 million, or $114 million, in a Series A co-led by Novo Holdings and Abingworth. British Patient Capital, Cancer Research Horizons, Eli Lilly and Company, Brandon Capital and Sofinnova also participated. The stated plan was to build out the NMTi-ADC platform, advance programs through clinical proof of concept, establish London lab operations and expand management and R&D.

Myricx Bio did not get to that clinical proof-of-concept milestone as an independent company. Instead, the Series A appears to have bought enough speed, data and team density for Novartis to step in earlier. That is a rational outcome in biotech, where large pharma can absorb the cost and execution risk of clinical development if the platform fits a strategic hole.

The management layer added after the Series A also reads differently in light of the sale. Mohit Rawat joined Myricx Bio as CEO in September 2025 after serving as president and chief business officer at Fusion Pharmaceuticals, which his company bio says was acquired by AstraZeneca for $2.4 billion in 2024. Before Fusion, Rawat held senior roles at Novartis and AbbVie. He arrived less than a year before the Novartis agreement, with a background built for business development as much as company scaling.

Novartis keeps buying platforms it can scale

For Novartis, Myricx Bio fits a capital allocation pattern that has become more explicit in its pipeline strategy. In its first-quarter 2026 update, Novartis described itself as focused on four therapeutic areas, including oncology, and named emerging technology platforms such as radioligand therapy and xRNA as priorities for continued investment. In the same update, Novartis said it had completed the acquisition of Avidity Biosciences, entered an agreement with Synnovation Therapeutics for a PI3K-alpha inhibitor in breast cancer and agreed to buy Excellergy in allergy and immunology.

Fiona Marshall, Novartis's president of biomedical research, framed the Myricx Bio deal the same way: ADCs have become important in cancer treatment, but new payload mechanisms are needed to overcome resistance and expand their use. The comparison she drew was radioligand therapy, a platform Novartis has already scaled inside the company.

That is the strategic read on Myricx Bio. Novartis is less interested in a single preclinical asset than in owning a payload mechanism it can test across targets, tumor types and future combinations. Myricx Bio brings lead programs, but the acquisition price says Novartis is paying for the option value of the chemistry platform.

The unanswered part is clinical durability. Myricx Bio's case rests on preclinical data and a mechanism that may address resistance and tolerability limits in current ADCs. The acquisition gives the platform a deeper development engine and a global oncology buyer. It also moves the main proof burden to Novartis: turning an elegant spinout story into human data that can justify buying before the clinic.