On Thursday, Boehringer Ingelheim announced a partnership with Synaffix to advance antibody-drug conjugates and exercised its fourth license option under a 2013 collaboration with Oxford BioTherapeutics.
Boehringer Ingelheim made two cancer-focused licensing deals on Thursday, gaining access to a pair of antibody-linked programs as the pharma continues to build out its oncology capabilities.
The first—and bigger—of Boehringer’s Thursday contracts is with Lonza’s Synaffix, a specialist in antibody-drug conjugates (ADC). Under the terms of this agreement, Boehringer will make an undisclosed upfront payment and pledge up to $1.3 billion in milestones, plus royalties on sales of potential products arising from the partnership.
In return, the pharma will gain access to Synaffix’s proprietary ADC platform, a clinically validated technology that can develop best-in-class molecules through the enzymatic modification of certain attachment sites on antibodies. Boehringer will leverage this approach to develop therapies for “an agreed but undisclosed number of cancer targets,” the first of which was already nominated when the partnership was inked.
“We aim to accelerate the delivery of first-in-class cancer treatments to improve cancer patient outcomes,” Lamine Mbow, global head of discovery research at Boehringer, said in a statement, adding that the company’s investment in ADCs will go toward “addressing the novel tumor target space to develop next-generation cancer treatments.”
Boehringer’s second licensing agreement on Thursday is with Oxford BioTherapeutics, with which the pharma exercised its option to a fourth novel cancer target. The pharma will take responsibility over further development and commercialization for the antibody product designed against the target, while Oxford will be eligible for development and milestone payments, as well as royalties.
Boehringer and Oxford first entered into their multi-year collaboration in 2013, when the companies partnered up to use the biotech’s OGAP proteomic platform to discover and validate oncology targets for Boehringer to take forward. The deal has proven productive for both parties, which in April 2022 went forward with the third exclusive license. The first two programs licensed under the 2013 agreement are already in clinical development.
In a statement on Thursday, Oxford CEO Christian Rohlff said that Boehringer exercising its fourth option under the deal “further validates the potential of our discovery platform” to identify novel targets and develop promising therapies to address unmet needs in cancer.
Thursday’s back-to-back deals continue Boehringer’s recent cancer investment spree. In January 2024, for instance, the pharma inked a second partnership with 3T Biosciences to advance next-generation cancer immunotherapies. In September of the same year, Boehringer inaugurated its new oncology facility in Vienna, Austria, where it plans to conduct research on “promising therapeutic approaches against cancer,” the company said at the time.
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