Tiny Inhibrx signs '$500 million' preclinical antibody outlicensing deal with Celgene
This article was originally published in Scrip
An eight-person biotechnology firm in San Diego called Inhibrx has entered into an option and license agreement with Celgene worth up to $500 million in upfront and milestone payments plus royalties. The deal centres around a preclinical antibody asset, but neither party has disclosed which antibody or its target or the disease it might address.
Celgene president of research and early development Tom Daniel only said: "Inhibrx has developed an antibody with strong preclinical study results on a highly validated target with very promising therapeutic potential." And Inhibrx CEO Mark Lappe would tell Scrip only that the antibody licensed to Celgene was "… highly differentiated and showed clear preclinical results that demonstrated superiority."
Cancer or inflammation seem likely disease areas given both companies' focuses: Inhibrx interests in metabolic diseases would not fit well with Celgenes' portfolio.
Mr Lappe told Scrip that the transaction with Celgene is the firm's first license agreement with a pharmaceutical company. This is a significant step for the company given that Inhibrx' intends to initiate five to six new antibody programmes each year and aims to license three or four to third parties each year, according to Mr Lappe.
"Our objective over the next decade is to license 30 to 40 programs to pharmaceutical companies. We should have another three or four licenses come together by the end of next year and we expect to stay at that pace going forward," Mr Lappe said. As long as Inhibrx can create highly differentiated biologic candidates, he said, there were a lot of companies that were interested in moving the antibodies (and some fusion proteins) into clinical development.
Until the deal with Celgene, all of Inhibrx's work has been funded by the company's executives and a few private investors. "We're capital independent and we're going to stay as a private entity going forward," Mr Lappe said.
Mark Lappe was previously the managing partner of Efficacy Biotech Fund and has been involved in more than 40 biotech and medical device startups, including Arius Research, a Canadian company funded by Efficacy that Roche acquired for C$191 million in 2008.
Inhibrx was set up by Quinn Deveraux and Brendan Eckelman in May 2010 to discover and validate drug targets, select therapeutic candidates, take the biologics through preclinical development and license the assets to pharmaceutical companies.
Dr Deveraux previously was a senior research scientist at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) in San Diego, where he led the development of novel target identification and validation platforms, including technology that generated the first GNF antibody that was moved into clinical development.
Dr Eckelman was a research investigator in the biotherapeutics group at GNF. He led the development of Inhibrx's VAST-mAb platform for antibody development, among other technologies, and his research covers novel approaches to treating cancer and inflammatory diseases.
Nearly all of Inhibrx's target and biologic discovery technology was developed internally. The company licensed the Glymaxx platform for enhancing the antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC) potency of antibodies from ProBioGen in October 2011. The German firm will receive milestone-dependent license fees as well as fees for mammalian cell line development and manufacturing services.