Another Partnership from Takeda and F-Star Therapeutics to Look for Antibody-Based Therapies
Japanese multinational pharmaceutical company Takeda has begun a drug discovery partnership with British biotech F-star Therapeutics. They will work together to develop multi-specific antibody-based therapies for cancer indications.
Although the upfront payment from Takeda is currently undisclosed, F-star will receive payment from the big pharma company throughout their collaboration. A milestone-dependent fund of up to 1 billion USD has also been offered to F-star by Takeda, along with the rights to the commercial royalties from the partnership’s potential products .
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F-star will offer up the use of their proprietary tetravalent and bispecific antibody platform to Takeda. Their ‘2+2 approach’ creates antibodies with two new binding regions on their Fc domain, an approach that F-star calls Fcab.
Neil Brewis, Chief Scientific Officer at F-star, said they do this by “not bolting on any additional domains or adding any additional linkers, but rather by changing about 15 surface-exposed amino acids.”
Herein, the resulting antibody has four binding sites which is dubbed a tetravalency. This is what gives F-star’s approach favourable potency. Brewis adds that their strengths lie in ‘the three Cs: cross-linking, clustering and conditionality.’
“Cross-linking means bringing an immune cell together with a tumour cell. Clustering means activating the immune cell receptors by bringing them together. And finally, conditionality means we only activate where our bispecific see both targets, and that’s in the tumour microenvironment,” Brewis said.
Takeda will use this platform with help from F-star to find novel antibody therapies for undisclosed cancer indications. The research, development, and commercialisation of the antibodies produced will be handled by Takeda, but F-star will retain the rights to the antibodies that did not arise from the partnership.
This is the third pact between the two companies since the start of last year. The first partnership between the two was signed in July 2022 and concerned a 1 million USD deal for a the research, development, and commercialisation of a bispecific antibody by Takeda. The second deal came in March of this year and was similar to the 2022 pact.
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