Pfizer Searches for Novel Tumor-Selective Antigens With $865M+ Cartography Pact

 

Cartography will hunt for novel tumor antigens, which Pfizer can opt into and advance into clinical development.

Making good on its promise to maintain its dealmaking pace, Pfizer on Tuesday inked a multi-year agreement with California’s Cartography Biosciences, with an eye toward identifying novel cancer targets for future drug development.

Under the terms of the deal, Cartography will use its proprietary technologies to discover and validate novel tumor-selective antigens, for which Pfizer has pledged up to $65 million in upfront and near-term milestone commitments, as well as option exercise payments. The pharma will also be on the hook for additional development, regulatory and commercial milestones totaling more than $800 million, if all options are exercised.

To hold up its end of the bargain, Cartography will leverage its ATLAS and SUMMIT platforms, which look at the expression of antigens across healthy and tumor cells to identify antigens that are specific to different cancers. Cartography will be in charge of the discovery and validation work in the partnership, according to the company’s news release.

Pfizer will then select the antigens it wants to take forward. The pharma will be responsible for all development, regulatory and commercial activities for these targets. It is unclear how many programs Pfizer expects to get out of the Cartography collaboration, nor did the pharma reveal what its priority indications are.

Aside from the deal’s structured payments, Cartography will also be entitled to tiered royalties on net sales of programs under the partnership that reach the market.

Pfizer has been on a high-profile, big-ticket spending spree. Most notably, the pharma was locked in a bidding war with Novo Nordisk over the obesity biotech Metsera. Following Pfizer’s initial offer of $4.9 billion in September, its Danish rival came forward in late October with an unsolicited bid of $8.5 billion—eventually upping the ante further to $10 billion.

The industry giants jockeyed over Metsera in a tug-of-war that included lawsuits, antitrust scrutiny and potshots fired from the White House. Ultimately, Pfizer came out on top with its $9.8 billion proposal.

Without taking a break, Pfizer in early December put $1.9 billion on the line to partner with China’s YaoPharma for an early-stage GLP-1 drug. A few days later, on Dec. 15, the pharma entered into two non-exclusive licensing deals with Adaptive Biotechnologies for immune diseases. One of these deals put Pfizer on the hook for around $890 million in upfront and milestone payments, while the financial details of the other were kept under wraps.

https://www.biospace.com/deals/pfizer-searches-for-novel-tumor-selective-antigens-with-865m-cartography-pact