Roche’s Chugai Pharmaceutical is starting off its centennial year by spending some Swiss cheese. The Japanese unit is tapping Zurich-based Araris Biotech to develop new antibody-drug conjugates, which nets Araris an upfront fee and up to $780 million in potential milestone payments.<\/p>\n
Chugai\u2019s chosen targets have not been disclosed, and Araris is also eligible to earn royalties on product sales, according to a Jan. 8 release.<\/p>\n
Chugai will pay for Araris\u2019 research activities. After exercising an option for resulting ADCs, the Big Pharma company will also handle development, manufacturing and global commercialization, according to the release.<\/p>\n
“This second collaboration with a large pharmaceutical company is a testimony of the attractiveness of our highly differentiated ADC platform and its potential to generate innovative ADCs,\u201d Araris Chief Scientific Officer Philipp Spycher, Ph.D., said in the release.<\/p>\n
That first collaboration came in November 2023, when Araris entered a research collaboration<\/a> (PDF) with another Japanese pharma, Otsuka’s Taiho Pharmaceutical, to develop ADCs for cancer targets.<\/p>\n Araris will use its linker-conjugation platform<\/a>, AraLinQTM, to build the ADCs. The firm published details of its tech<\/a> in ChemBioChem in September 2024. The platform is designed for attaching multiple payloads to an antibody.<\/p>\n