As year-end nears, pharma groups plump up their pipelines

There has been a flurry of new licensing deals in the last few days, with Bristol Myers Squibb, Sanofi, Pfizer, Roche, and little Yarrow Bioscience all adding to their R&D pipelines.

BMS' antibody alliance

BMS signed a multiyear agreement with antibody specialist Harbour BioMed, which has operations in the US, the Netherlands, and China, that involves near-term payments of $90 million with another $1.035 billion in potential development and commercial milestones.

Details of the pact are sketchy at the moment, but Harbour will work on 'next-generation multi-specific antibodies' on behalf of BMS, using its Harbour Mice fully human antibody technology platform, designed to produce drug candidates with enhanced therapeutic efficacy. Preliminary clinical trials on candidates emerging from the collaboration will be carried out in China.

Roche's cancer collab with Caris

Roche subsidiary Genentech has teamed up with the therapeutic development unit of AI-focused company Caris Life Sciences, Caris Discovery, on a project to identify and validate novel oncology targets in solid tumour tissue. Caris has a repository of nearly 500,000 tumour samples, linked to molecular and clinical data, that can be mined for insights into specific cancer mechanisms.

Under the terms of the deal, Caris is eligible for upfront and near-term payments of $25 million, with another $1.1 billion in possible future payments tied to research, development, commercial, and sales achievements.

Sanofi taps ADEL and Dren for antibodies

Sanofi signed two licensing deals on the same day this week, the first a $1.04 billion agreement with South Korea's ADEL – including $80 million upfront – that gives it global rights to a tau-targeting antibody being developed for Alzheimer's disease. The humanised antibody, called ADEL-Y01, targets tau protein acetylated at Lysine-280 (acK280), a novel target. It is in phase 1 testing.

That was followed by another deal with Dren Bio, which builds on an earlier $1.9 billion agreement in which Sanofi claimed rights to a CD20-targeted bispecific myeloid cell engager (MCE), DR-0201, designed to reset the immune system in autoimmune diseases like lupus. The new collaboration focuses on a next-generation B-cell depletion therapy and includes an upfront payment of $100 million and another $1.7 billion at the back end.

Pfizer and Adaptive's autoimmune pact

Pfizer's licensing deal this week – in fact, a pair of non-exclusive deals – was with Adaptive Biotechnologies, with up to $890 million on the table to use its T-cell receptor (TCR) discovery platform and large-scale immune receptor antigen mapping data.

One deal is focusing on finding disease-specific TCRs in rheumatoid arthritis, with the second applying its TCR-antigen binding dataset to train Pfizer's AI models used for drug discovery in multiple immunology applications. Specific financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.

Yarrow's Graves' disease pick

Finally, this week – so far, at least – Yarrow Bioscience has paid $70 million upfront for ex-China rights to an antibody targeting the thyroid-stimulating hormone receptor (TSHR) for the treatment of Graves' disease and thyroid eye disease (TED) – codenamed GS-098 – from Changchun GeneScience Pharma (GenSci).

GS-09 (renamed as YB-101 by Yarrow) is designed to block the pathogenic activity of thyroid-stimulating autoantibodies that drive disease progression in Graves' and TED, and will be Yarrow's lead drug programme. The total value of the deal could be worth more than $1.4 billion.

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