Dotinurad

Under a new deal, Sobi gets its hands on Arthrosi Therapeutics’ pozdeutinurad, a next-gen, once-daily oral URAT1 inhibitor.\n Fresh off a $153 million series E round, Arthrosi Therapeutics is skipping an IPO route and is instead being bought up for a potential value of $1.5 billion from Swedish biopharma Sobi. Under the deal, San Diego-based Arthrosi will secure $950 million upfront as well as a contingent consideration of up to $550 million. For its part, Sobi gets its hands on Arthrosi’s pozdeutinurad, a next-gen, once-daily oral URAT1 inhibitor.This med is being assessed in several phase 3 tests for progressive and tophaceous gout, with initial readouts slated for next year.“The acquisition of Arthrosi allows us to expand our gout pipeline with a highly differentiated new asset,” Guido Oelkers, president and CEO of Sobi, said in a statement.“Pozdeutinurad has the potential to become the therapy of choice for patients who have progressive gout with persistent and unresolved symptoms despite first-line therapy,” the CEO added.Gout is a type of arthritis that causes sudden, severe joint pain. Common drug treatment includes simple pain relief, but pharma has been working on potential curative treatments for decades, though with mixed results.Arthrosi’s leading drug candidate is an inhibitor of URAT1, a transporter that has been a target for gout drugs going back to the approval of probenecid in 1951. Probenecid and other early gout drugs hit multiple targets but also caused a range of side effects. Seeking to avoid the adverse events, developers of subsequent waves of gout drugs tried to create more potent and specific URAT1 inhibitors.AstraZeneca acquired a URAT1 inhibitor in its $1.3 billion takeover of Ardea Biosciences in 2012 and won FDA approval for the drug in 2015. By 2020, the product, Zurampic, had, however, landed on the scrap heap.The commercial struggles of Zurampic, which carried a boxed warning, didn\'t deter others from trying to launch URAT1 inhibitors.A team behind Zurampic has reformed at Crystalys Therapeutics to advance dotinurad, a URAT1 inhibitor that is approved in Asian markets including Japan. And China’s Atom Therapeutic recently reported a phase 2b/3 win for its own URAT1 inhibitor, lingdolinurad. 

Sobi plans to buy Arthrosi Therapeutics, a Phase 3 gout biotech, for $950 million upfront and as much as $550 million in additional milestones, the Swedish drugmaker said Saturday. The Arthrosi acquisition arrives just two months after the seven-year-old biotech disclosed a $153 million Series E to complete two late-stage tests of pozdeutinurad, its experimental URAT1 inhibitor. At the time, Arthrosi said it expected the trials to read out in the second quarter of 2026. After a bleak few years, the biopharma industry has been enjoying a surge in M&A over the past few quarters, including deals for Bluejay , Halda and Cidara announced in recent weeks. With the deal, Sobi will buy into a brewing competition in the URAT1 space. Sobi CEO Guido Oelkers said the drug “has the potential to materially accelerate our growth until the mid 2030s, and beyond.” The URAT1 field heated up this fall, with Arthrosi’s raise and another megaround from fellow San Diego biotech Crystalys Therapeutics. Crystalys unveiled with a $205 million Series A and two Phase 3 trials of dotinurad, which is approved in Japan, China and a few other countries in Asia. Both companies are working on URAT1 medicines that, in people with gout, aim to tamp down on serum urate levels. Urate crystals can form in joints, especially the big toe, when too much uric acid builds up in the blood. Patients experience intense pain and inflammation. “We believe that Sobi’s global expertise in commercialisation will accelerate our shared mission to deliver pozdeutinurad’s potentially transformative benefits for individuals living with gout,” Arthrosi CEO and founder Litain Yeh said in a statement. Also for gout, Sobi has a drug before the FDA with a June 27 action date. That drug is called nanoecapsulated sirolimus plus pegadricase (NASP), formerly known as SEL-212 . Sobi anticipates the Arthrosi deal will close in the first half of 2026.