Gilead is enlisting a new partner in the bustling field of antibody-drug conjugates, a type of chemotherapy that it’s struggled to capitalize on since buying another ADC developer for $21 billion.
The biopharma is paying $20 million upfront to partner with Tubulis, a Munich-based biotech that nabbed $138 million in funding earlier this year. Its mission is to become an “independent global leader in the ADC space,” CEO Dominik Schumacher
told
Endpoints News
in March.
The companies said Tuesday that they will work together to discover a new ADC against an undisclosed solid tumor target. Tubulis will run discovery and development work designing a topoisomerase I inhibitor-based ADC candidate. Gilead can then opt into the program for $30 million and pay up to $365 million in biobucks plus tiered royalties if the medicine makes it to market.
The collaboration “may help increase the therapeutic value of the ADC modality,” Gilead’s EVP of research Flavius Martin said in a statement.
Gilead made one of the most famous moves in the ADC world by buying Immunomedics for $21 billion in 2020, but the drug at the heart of the deal has since run into hurdles.
In October, Gilead
withdrew
Trodelvy’s accelerated approval for certain forms of urothelial cancer after consulting with the FDA. It also discontinued development of the medicine in certain forms of non-small cell lung cancer, and the company took another hit in the third quarter, with a
$1.75 billion
impairment charge related to Trodelvy.
As for Tubulis, it wants to iterate on each component of an ADC — the linkers, the antibody and the payload. Schumacher previously told Endpoints that his startup is not looking to make minuscule adjustments. “We want to have flexibility to tailor-make an ADC,”
he said
.
Tubulis
entered
the clinic this year with a NaPi2b-targeting ADC in ovarian cancer and lung adenocarcinoma. The startup also licensed out a CD30 ADC to
Oncoteq
for undisclosed terms a year ago and made a $22 million upfront
pact with Bristol Myers Squibb
in 2023.
The company has more than 60 employees and
expanded
to the US this year, when it opened a location in the Cambridge Innovation Center in the Boston area.