TegMine Therapeutics has secured certain rights to OBI Pharma’s antibody-drug conjugate technology, advancing the efforts of former Stemcentrx scientists to treat cancer by targeting carbohydrates.
California-based TegMine has built a platform for discovering antibodies against previously inaccessible glycan epitopes, which are carbohydrate structures that can be specific to tumors.
The biotech is betting that going after carbohydrate antigens that are specific to tumors and largely absent from healthy tissues can lead to ADCs that deliver a better risk-benefit profile through improved specificity.
TegMine has identified Taiwan’s OBI as a company that can help advance its ambitions. The new deal secures TegMine the right to use OBI’s glycan-based technology to identify ADC candidates.
If an ADC candidate is identified through the work, TegMine and OBI will enter into a formal licensing agreement.
Neither party has disclosed financial details of the deal. OBI discussed the potential for it to receive an upfront fee and milestone payments in a filing with the Taipei Exchange, but no numbers are being published at this stage.
OBI has applied its ADC-enabling tech to internal candidates aimed at targets such as Nectin-4, TROP2 and HER2. The biotech pitches its ADC platforms as a way to enhance conjugation precision, drug loading flexibility and stability, thereby overcoming some of the limitations associated with the modality.
TegMine CEO Jeff Bernstein, Ph.D., said in a statement that OBI’s technology is an “ideal complement” to his company’s attempts to target cancer-specific glycans. Bernstein worked at Stemcentrx, the ADC biotech that AbbVie bought for $5.8 billion, before co-founding TegMine. Bernstein is joined in the TegMine C-suite by Daniel Hyduke, Ph.D., another researcher who lists Stemcentrx on his resume.