Who: Roche and Oxford BioTherapeutics
What: The Swiss major has entered into a multi-year collaboration with OBT to develop first-in-class antibody-based therapeutics for the treatment of cancer.
Why: Roche wants access to OBT’s recently enhanced proprietary OGAP-Verify discovery platform which the UK company says allows for enhanced sensitivity with improved target selection that increases the success rate of compounds transitioning into clinical development.
Financials: OBT will receive up to $36m upfront and may be eligible to receive milestone payments potentially exceeding $1bn, plus product royalties on net sales.
Analysis: Aside from the welcome cash boost, bringing Roche onboard is further validation of the technology platform at OBT and its own pipeline which includes monoclonal and bispecific antibodies as well as antibody-drug conjugates. It already has partnerships with major pharma players, most notably with Boehringer Ingelheim, which earlier this year exercised its option to a fourth novel cancer target covered by a multi-year collaboration first signed in 2013; the first two programs licensed under the original agreement are already in clinical development.
OBT also has deals in place with the likes of AbbVie’s ImmunoGen division, Genmab, Amgen and Zymeworks. At the firm’s core is OGAP-Verify, an upgraded version of the company’s technology that is now more sensitive than immunohistochemistry (IHC), measuring membrane proteins as low as 50 copies-per-cell in biopsies with quantitative mass spectrometry, thus “removing the ambiguities of IHC antibody specificity and sensitivity,” OBT claims.
The firm noted that despite recent progress in ADC development, only 10% of cancer patients were eligible for treatment with existing drugs, with ADC-target expression on tumors a major factor in patient eligibility. However, the majority of ADCs in development target the same nine proteins as those already approved and by leveraging OGAP-Verify, OBT believes can identify first-in-class targets to treat patients who are currently ineligible for existing treatments.
The Roche cash will also come in handy as the company advances its lead candidate, OBT076. The ADC, which targets the CD205 receptor, is in Phase I trials in the US and Europe across several advanced solid tumor indications, including gastric, endometrial, ovarian and non-small-cell lung cancer.
The link-up with OBT is just the latest in the number of ADC deals inked by Roche. It began the year by paying $80m upfront to gain exclusive global rights from Innovent for the Chinese firm’s IBI3009, a DLL3-targeted ADC candidate which has just gone into Phase I for small-cell lung cancer. That deal followed a pact in 2024 with Medilink Therapeutics for its preclinical stage ADC, YL211, which targets c-Mesenchymal epithelial transition factor for treatment of solid tumors.