Blueprint Medicines: Chasing Gleevec to a $9B Allergy Drug

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Blueprint Medicines was built to find the next Gleevec-style cancer drug. It ended up pivoting to allergic disease instead, and selling to Sanofi for $9B. This is the platform, the pivot, and who got paid. Blueprint Medicines set out to be the natural sequel to Gleevec: a company founded by two of the scientists behind that landmark cancer drug, built to order by Third Rock Ventures' "venture creation" model, with a proprietary kinase-inhibitor library designed to drug the 517 other broken molecular switches Gleevec couldn't touch. A decade later, Sanofi paid roughly $9 billion for the company... just not for a cancer drug. Blueprint's blockbuster asset, avapritinib (AYVAKIT), found its…