Gilead gains rights to Compugen’s immunotherapy programme in deal worth up to $848m

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来源: PMLiVE

Gilead Sciences has announced an agreement with Compugen worth up to $848m to exclusively licence its preclinical antibody programme against IL-18 binding protein.

The cancer immunotherapy company utilises its predictive computational discovery capabilities to identify new drug targets and biological pathways for developing novel cancer immunotherapies.

The programme includes COM503, a high affinity antibody that blocks the interaction between IL-18 binding protein and IL-18, releasing natural IL-18 in the tumour microenvironment and inhibiting cancer growth.

“IL-18 is one of the rare cytokines which is naturally inhibited by an endogenous binding protein, presenting a unique opportunity to use a blocking antibody to increase the local concentrations of IL-18 within the tumour where it can potentiate anti-tumour immune responses, thereby potentially overcoming the limitations of systemically administered cytokines,” explained Anat Cohen-Dayag, president and chief executive officer at Compugen.

Under the terms of the agreement, Compugen will be responsible for the ongoing preclinical development and the future early-stage study of COM503, after which Gilead will have the sole right to develop and commercialise the candidate.

In exchange, Gilead will make Compugen an upfront payment of $60m and $30m in a near-term milestone payment, subject to investigational new drug clearance of COM503 expected in 2024. Compugen will also be eligible to receive up to an additional $758m in future development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments, as well as single-digit to low double-digit tiered royalties on worldwide net sales.

Flavius Martin, executive vice president, research, Gilead Sciences, said: “We are very pleased to add COM503 to our pipeline of investigational immuno-oncology therapies that have the potential to transform care for patients with cancer.

“We believe that this collaboration complements our strategy of developing modalities which promote immune-mediated tumour killing and may enable new combination therapies with programs in our growing oncology portfolio.”

The deal comes just over a month after Gilead’s Kite and Arcellx expanded their cell therapy partnership in a deal worth over $285m.

The partners originally announced an agreement in December last year to jointly develop and commercialise Arcellx’s CART-ddBCMA for relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma.

Under the latest agreement, the companies’ collaboration for CART-ddBCMA will now include lymphomas, and Kite has also exercised its option to negotiate a licence for Arcellx’s ARC-SparX programme, ACLX-001, also in multiple myeloma.

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