Roche-owned Genentech has entered into a major collaboration with Earendil Labs to discover and develop bispecific antibodies targeting oncology, in a deal valued at up to $1.5 billion.
Deal Structure and Financial Terms
Under the terms of the agreement, Earendil will receive $55 million upfront, along with up to $1.445 billion in development, regulatory, and sales milestone payments. In return, the US and China-based biotech will help Genentech identify and advance a range of bispecific antibody programmes based on pre-agreed target combinations.
Earendil will lead each programme’s early development up to the early clinical stage, after which Genentech will assume responsibility for all subsequent development and commercialisation activities. Should any of these therapies reach the market, Earendil is also eligible to receive tiered royalties on net sales.
AI-Powered Platform at the Core of This Bispecific Antibody Deal
Central to this bispecific antibody deal is Earendil’s artificial intelligence-powered high-throughput biology platform, which integrates predictive protein modelling and generative protein design to accelerate the identification of new therapeutics. Through this platform, Earendil aims to create differentiated bispecifics capable of addressing unmet medical needs, including treatment resistance and disease relapse in oncology.
Earendil’s Growing Industry Partnerships
Roche is not the first major pharmaceutical company to collaborate with Earendil. In January, Sanofi signed a $2.56 billion autoimmune-focused agreement with the biotech. Sanofi also contributed to Earendil’s $787 million funding round, which additionally saw participation from Dimension Capital and Pfizer and Hillhouse’s Biotech Development Fund. The financing is enabling Earendil to expand the use of its AI drug discovery capabilities while progressing a portfolio of more than 40 programmes spanning disease areas including immunology, inflammation, and oncology.
Roche’s Simultaneous Deal with Atavistik Bio
Announced on the same day as the Earendil agreement, Roche also signed a research collaboration with Atavistik Bio valued at up to $1.97 billion. The partnership will see both companies work together to develop novel small molecule therapies for cardiovascular, renal, and metabolic diseases — a therapeutic space collectively referred to as CVRM.
Through this agreement, Atavistik Bio will receive $70 million upfront, up to $1.9 billion in research, development, and commercial milestones, and tiered royalties on potential net sales. The biotech will support Roche in identifying what the companies describe as “cryptic, biologically relevant” binding regions on hard-to-drug targets within the CVRM space.
At the heart of this collaboration is Atavistik’s proprietary AMPS drug discovery platform, which enables the identification of novel allosteric binding points for small molecules, with the goal of producing differentiated therapeutic candidates. This agreement with Roche represents Atavistik’s first move into the CVRM space, as the company has until now concentrated primarily on haematological conditions.
