Seattle Genetics and OBT Establish Cancer Antibody-Drug Conjugate Collaboration

Seattle Genetics and Oxford BioTherapeutics (OBT) established a collaboration to jointly discovery novel antibody-drug conjugates against cancer. OBT will create panels of mAbs against tumor-specific antigens identified using its Oxford Genome Anatomy Project (OGAP®) database. These will be screened using Seattle’s ADC technology.

Under terms of the deal the firms will have an equal number of alternating options to select programs from preclinical ADCs for exclusive, worldwide development and commercialization. Each firm will receive progress-dependent milestone paymetns and royalties on net sales of any resulting ADCs developed by its partner.

The OGAP database is built on disease protein information generated by OBT in-house coupled with genetic and clinical data from 50 different human tissues, including 5,000 cancer membrane proteins. The firm claims the resulting database system integrates all clinical and experimental  expression data from about 1 million human protein peptide sequences, 15,000  validated genes,  50 tissues/organs, 58 diseases, and about 8 million SNPs and haplotypes.

“Through the agreement we contribute our know-how and proprietary ADC technology and gain access to novel cancer targets obtained from OBT’s expertise in target discovery,” remarks Jonathan Drachman, M.D., svp for research and translational medicine at Seattle Genetics. “We believe that this type of multi-product collaboration maximizes the chances of success and capitalizes on each company’s strengths.”

Seattle Genetics is focused on the development of antibody-based therapeutics against cancer. Just last month FDA granted accelerated approval for the firm’s ADC drug Adcetris for two indications: the treatment of patients with Hodgkin lymphoma after failure of autologous stem cell transplant (ASCT) or after failure of at least two prior multiagent chemotherapy regimens in patients who are not ASCT candidates; and for the treatment of patients with systemic anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL) after failure of at least one prior multiagent chemotherapy regimen.

The drug is also undergoing clinical development for the treatment or relapse prevention in various clinical settings settings of Hodgkin lymphoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and systemic ALCL. In August Seattle Genetics initiated a Phase II trial evaluating brentuximab vedotin in patients with relapsed or refractory CD30-positive non-Hodgkin lymphomas including diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, peripheral T-cell lymphoma, and other less common lymphoma subtypes. 

Seattle Genetics has three additional ADC candidates undergoing Phase I testing: SGN-75 is in development against renal cell carcinoma and non-Hldgkin lymphoma, ASG-5ME is being evaluated for the treatment of pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer, and ASG-22ME is in development against solid tumors.