Author Archives: Mark Frigerio

Antibody-Drug Conjugate companies are limbering up and stretching their respective muscles in preparation for the next awards race

Antibody-Drug Conjugate companies are limbering up and stretching their respective muscles in preparation for the next awards race

With the Japan 2020 Olympics now in full swing, the ADC field is warming up for its own prestigious annual awards competition as part of the World ADC conference from Hanson Wade in a few month’s time. Now in its 8th year, I see that the nominations for the awards have just opened, and this year it’s great to see they are expanded to include an Outstanding Academic Investigator Award.

The awards seem to have been rather dominated over the last few years but I was intrigued to see who actually comes out on top since the last Olympics were held in Rio in 2016. With 2 points for a win and 1 point for runner-up spots, the podium ADC medal table for multi-year recipients looks like the following –

Company / developerWinnerRunner-UpScore
BSP Pharmaceuticals328
Mersana Therapeutics226
Abzena226
Sutro Biopharma215
ADC Therapeutics215
Bicycle Therapeutics215
Daiichi Sankyo204
PPD204

So gold goes to BSP Pharmaceuticals, silver to Mersana Therapeutics and Abzena and bronze to Sutro Biopharma, ADC Therapeutics and Bicycle Therapeutics. An honourable mention should go to Daiichi Sankyo and PPD, as well as Legochem Biosciences who have shown strong consistency without a win.

It is really encouraging to see such a diverse range of technologies, developers, researchers and manufacturers that made it through to this year’s nominations. This makes the job of shortlisting these a challenge, and of selecting the winners even more difficult, but just as the Olympics showcases the many different and varied talents of individuals and teams, so the ADC awards recognises the different contributions to the field.

But I came to asking myself why there is such a diverse range of offerings in the ADC space. It could be argued that the closest we have to a winning technology platform is the vedotin linker-payload however this is only embedded within 3 of the 10 approved ADC drugs, with the ozogamycin linker-payload technology in close competition being in 2/10 approved ADCs.

So why haven’t we figured out yet an approach that outperforms all others? Perhaps in part because development still takes a long time, meaning that even if an optimal ADC technology is identified today, it will still have to wait many years to see it progress into patients and several more to reach market approval.

In expanding the utility of ADCs to fulfil their promise of precision targeted medicine, chemists and biochemists are playing their part with new toxins, new linkers and new conjugation approaches filling the preclinical pipeline. Couple this with different delivery modalities being developed by biologists including antibody fragments, single chains, nanobodies among others, the ADC landscape truly benefits from its multidisciplinary connections.  

So maybe this is not about finding a platform that wins out over all others, but that as the ADC field expands, it allows the technology offerings to follow suit, something not lost on investors. This may be the quickest way to solve the ADC therapeutic index conundrum, and as anyone who follows the Olympics knows, it’s usually the quickest who gets the gold.

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The ADC investment cavalry is on the charge, but which ADCs will stay the development course?

The ADC investment cavalry is on the charge, but which ADCs will stay the development course?

With the recent news that Synaffix has signed a huge licencing deal with ProfoundBio worth up to a quarter of a billion dollars for accessing their conjugation and linker technologies, it made me reflect on some of the recent deals in the ADC space over the last year that have really caught the eye. The team at Profound Bio have pedigree coming from the Seagen stable, and clearly know a thing or two about how to develop and commercialise ADCs, so when they bet on a horse you can be sure that it has a good chance of winning. But this was only the latest furlong in a cycle of thoroughbred ADC deals.

Following the approval of Trodelvy® earlier in 2020, Gilead parted with an eye-watering $21 billion in October last year to acquire it’s developer Immunomedics. Perhaps not a bad bet, given the large number of clinical trials (28 at the last count) that are active with Trodelvy®.

Coming up fast on the spending rails is AZ who have doubled-down on their 2019 $6.9 billion collaboration with Daiich Sankyo for Enhertu® with a similar follow-up $5 billion collaboration on the DS-1062a ADC last year. With a diverse pipeline of their own, having acquired Spirogen for their ADC PBD dimer payloads in 2013  for less than half a billion dollars, AZ are spreading their bets across the ADC development track.

Following close being is BMS who recently announced a $3.1 billion collaboration with Eisai on its folate receptor alpha ADC, which is not without risk given the challenges with this target including Immunogen’s Phase III ADC failure in 2019, and Eisai’s own struggles developing farletuzumab.

Not to be outdone, Boehringer Ingelheim parted with $1.4 billion to acquire NBE Therapeutics in December last year and brought in-house their ADC linker-payload conjugation SMAC-Technology™ platform.

And back in November last year, Merck shelled out $2.75 billion to acquire VelosBio and got its hands directly on their ROR1 ADC pipeline, which came hot on the heels of its investment into Seagen and their vedotin linker-payload ADC offering to the tune of $1 billion.

Off the back of double-digit ADC approvals and a maturing pipeline of candidates waiting to cross the finishing line, these ADC developers are jockeying for position.

By demonstrating that bundling a conjugation technology and payload offering, Synaffix and NBE Therapeutics have shown the lead in delivering value for investors. Big Pharma are playing their part, and are seemingly in a competition to see how much they can pay for ADC assets rather than how little. If the 2020’s really is the decade of ADCs, then this race still has a way to run yet.