Adimab flexes partnering muscles

LEBANON, N.H.—Adimab LLC is furthering its partnering activities with the announcement of independent partnerships with iTeos Therapeutics and Kodiak Sciences. Per the terms of both agreements, Adimab will apply its proprietary platform to discover and/or optimize antibodies against targets chosen by each company. iTeos and Kodiak will have the right to develop and commercialize all therapeutic antibodies resulting from their respective collaborations.

 

"About three years ago we started partnering with early stage companies that were pursuing very innovative and novel disease biology," Tillman Gerngross, CEO and co-founder of Adimab, said in a press release. "These partnerships have been quite successful. Our partners can immediately leverage our industry-leading discovery capabilities at a relative cost. This allows our partners to focus on the underlying biology for their programs and rapidly develop a preclinical pipeline."

 

"Adimab is clearly an excellent strategic fit for iTeos. The quality of Adimab's platform has consistently generated leads that are superior to the output from competing technologies," remarked Christophe Quéva, chief scientific officer of iTeos. "Also, the ease and speed with which we were able to come to business terms and finalize an agreement was a pleasant surprise. It allowed us to quickly move to the far more important part of the collaboration—generating high-quality therapeutic candidates for our patients."

 

Adimab has also announced that Eli Lilly and Co., Kite Pharma and Jounce Therapeutics have all exercised independent commercial licenses to antibody programs generated under existing collaborations with Adimab.

 

"We are pleased with the success of our collaboration with Adimab. The versatility and quality of the Adimab platform have been instrumental in supporting our CAR T cell therapies beyond KTE-C19," Dr. Tony Polverino, vice president of research at Kite Pharma, commented in a statement. "We look forward to continuing our partnership with Adimab to advance important therapies for cancer patients."

 

Just a day prior to this announcement, Adimab shared that it had begun a multi-target partnership with Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. The deal will see Adimab leverage its platform to discover and optimize antibodies against multiple targets selected by Takeda, who will have the right to then develop and commercialize therapeutic programs that result.

 

The terms of the deal stipulate that Adimab will apply its proprietary yeast-based discovery and optimization platform or its proprietary rapid B cell sorting capabilities to identify fully human antibodies and against chosen targets. For each target, Takeda will be granted the right to research antibodies generated during the collaboration for possible use in therapeutic products. In return, Takeda will make an undisclosed upfront payment to Adimab, as well as research fees and technical milestones. Should Takeda exercise its option to exclusively license antibodies generated under this partnership as therapeutic leads, Adimab will receive license fees, clinical milestones and royalties on product sales.

 

"We are excited to have Takeda as a partner, and we look forward to demonstrating Adimab's advantages to the Takeda team," said Gerngross. "This partnership, like most of our initial partnerships, will focus on a handful of projects. Our goal is to have our partners see the output from the collaboration and fall in love with the platform. We are always happy to expand the initial collaboration into additional funded discovery projects, or even transfer the platform to our partner's facilities; to date, most of our partnerships have expanded in some way."

 

 

SOURCE: Adimab press release