Gilead licences MacroGenics technology
pharmafile | January 9, 2013 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | DART, Gilead, MacroGenics
Private biotech company MacroGenics has licenced its bi-specific antibody platform technology to Gilead Sciences for products aimed at four unnamed targets.
The deal could be worth more than $100 million in the medium-term but has the potential to earn MacroGenics as much as $1 billion if all goes to plan, the company says.
Gilead is paying to develop and commercialise dual-affinity re-targeting (DART) products, which allow a single recombinant molecule to target two different antigens – the fourth such deal signed with MacroGenics in the past two years.
The company is keeping the rights to one of the four new Gilead programmes outside North America and Europe – which could include markets such as Japan, China, Korea, Brazil and Russia.
The firms are tight-lipped about the specifics, but Gilead’s senior vice president, oncology and inflammation, Roy Baynes, said the company was committed to meeting “significant unmet medical needs for patients with cancer and other life-threatening diseases”.
DARTs may be engineered with either short or extended serum half-life to support various applications in different disease areas and DART proteins can be used to turn a patient’s cell-destroying, immune effector cells against tumour cells.
Calling it a ‘promising new area of research’, Gilead will pay MacroGenics up to $30 million in licence fees plus another $85 million in pre-clinical milestones across the four DART programmes.
Gilead is funding all MacroGenics’ research in each, may pay royalties on future sales – and could also shell out up to $1 billion in clinical, regulatory and other milestones if the quartet of projects achieves what the companies hope.
Adam Hill
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