Seattle, Bayer HealthCare enter new antibody-drug conjugate collaboration

Bayer HealthCare executive committee member and global drug discovery head Prof. Andreas Busch said, "Antibody-drug conjugates are promising approaches in oncology which can attack tumor cells in a much more targeted way for cancer patients, such that healthy cells are less severely affected."

Leveraging Seattle’s auristatin-based ADC technology with antibodies to several oncology targets, Bayer is responsible for research, product development, manufacturing and commercialization of all resulting products.

Seattle Genetics corporate development vice president Natasha Hernday said, "Across internal and collaborator programs, there are more than 15 ADCs in clinical development using our technology, and we have the potential to receive more than $3.5 billion in future milestones plus royalties from these strategic alliances."

According to the deal, Seattle will earn an upfront and option exercise fees of up to $20m and is eligible for over $500m in fees and milestones along with royalties under multi-target deal.

Seattle’s proprietary technology employs synthetic cytotoxic agents and stable linker systems that attach the cytotoxic agents to the antibody.

Designed to be stable in the bloodstream, linker systems release the potent cell-killing agent inside targeted cancer cells once thereby sparing non-targeted cells.