Roche places a $1bn bet on C4T degrader-antibody conjugates
Roche is paying $20 million upfront to secure rights to two degrader-antibody conjugates (DACs), developed by longtime partner C4 Therapeutics, staking its claim to an emerging treatment approach in oncology.
Similar to antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), but using catalytic protein degraders, rather than toxins, DACs offer the potential for improved specificity and lower toxicity, as well as the potential to overcome cancer resistance, and have become sought-after assets for licensing.
Roche's agreement with C4T includes more than $1 billion in discovery, regulatory, and commercial milestones, as well as an option on a third DAC candidate. Details are thin for the moment, referring only to "undisclosed oncology targets," but C4T is responsible for coming up with the degrader payloads, with Roche designing the antibody carriers.
Roche will be responsible for advancing DAC candidates through preclinical and clinical development as well as commercialisation, under the terms of the deal.
The two companies have been working together for a decade, initially focusing on targeted protein degrader projects, which yielded candidates targeting EGFR and BRAF – subsequently sidelined – with others against undisclosed targets remaining active and in the lead identification stage, according to C4T's annual report for 2025.
"For the past decade, C4T and Roche have worked together to drive research in targeted protein degradation and to establish this modality as a new way to treat cancer," said Andrew Hirsch, president and chief executive of the Watertown, Massachusetts-based biotech.
Combining C4T's degrader expertise with Roche's expertise in ADCs through the development of products like breast cancer therapy Kadcyla (trastuzumab emtansine) and Polivy (polatuzumab vedotin) for lymphoma will "build a powerful new modality that can offer transformative medicines for patients," he added.
The promise of DACs has prompted various other licensing and acquisition deals, including Pfizer subsidiary Seagen's $3.4 billion alliance with Nurix in 2023, Vertex Pharma's $945 million partnership with Orum Therapeutics in 2024 focusing on a DAC intended as a preconditioning agent for use with gene-editing therapies, and Bristol Myers Squibb's purchase of rights to Orum's anti-CD33 blood cancer therapy ORM-6151 for up to $280 million last year.
MSD (known as Merck & Co in the US and Canada) also entered into a DAC alliance with C4T in 2023, which featured an upfront payment of $10 million and milestone payments totalling approximately $600 million, but that was terminated by MSD last November.
