Collaboration is the key to ADC development

To deliberately mis-quote ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, ask me my top 3 priorities for ADC development and I tell you “collaboration, collaboration, collaboration”.

This collaborative sentiment has been echoing in the corridors of ADC power for a while now, with an increasing wave of press releases and biobuck figures being banded around through a ratcheting up of collaborative tie-ups.

Following on from the recent expansion of the collaboration between Mersana to access Synaffix’s GlycoConnect™ site-specific ADC tech for six additional ADC targets, Mersana may leverage this as its preferred site-specific ADC bioconjugation technology for a follow-up collaboration with Janssen as part of their ADC development plan. Sort of collaboration squared. Not to be left behind, Seagen and Sanofi announced their collaboration recently that utilises each other’s technologies, and will co-fund the ADC development activities to then share equally in any future profit. Early down payments are evident in both cases, but these votes of confidence go a long way to ensure their outcomes should be maximised.

Expanding portfolio’s into the ADC space has seen an uptick in activity and newer entrants to the field are leveraging deep industry knowledge power-houses such as the recent news that ImmunoGen has licenced its novel Camptothecin payload platform to Eli Lilly. Perhaps more coalition than collaboration but both bring significant innovation backgrounds.

This comes off the back of recent announcements including the Novasep and McSAF collaboration on preclinical production of novel ADCs, Adcentrx Therapeutics and AvantGen’s multi-target collaboration partnership to discovery antibodies suitable for ADC development, and Abzena and BiVictriX announcing a collaboration for bispecific ADC proof-of-concept, lead selection and optimization studies.

Clearly a lot going on in the collaboration space, and these collaborators are not playing a zero sum game but are expanding the ADC pie by putting their own tech on the line. This seemingly is a very synergistic approach and these collaboration numbers are no longer being measured typically in the millions but the billions. Clearly collaboration captures value.

A while ago I wrote about the ADC investor landscape which was more focussed on the M&A activities rather than true collaboration, but relationships have moved on since then, and perhaps in part due to the cross-functional discipline that is bioconjugation. Something to consider is how to reach into expertise for ADC development support, as 80% of all ADC work is outsourced to a CDMO. Call the experts when experts are called for.

It is now time for CDMOs to lay the foundation for more-strategic partnerships as drug developing companies look to outsource more work and develop stronger collaborations over the longer term, something not lost on Boston Consulting Group among others.

And to deliberately mis-quote another generational influencer Roy Castle, ‘If you want to be the best, collaboration’s what you need’. And who can argue with that.