AbbVie and Umoja Biopharma have announced two exclusive licence agreements worth over $1.44bn to develop CAR-T cell therapy candidates in oncology.
The first agreement gives AbbVie licensing rights to Umoja’s CD19-directed in-situ generated CAR-T cell therapy candidates. This includes UB-VV111, Umoja’s lead clinical programme for blood cancers currently in investigational new drug-enabling studies.
Under the second agreement, the two companies will develop up to four in-situ CAR-T therapy candidates for targets chosen by AbbVie.
The collaboration will leverage Umoja’s VivoVec gene delivery platform, which works to enable T cells in the body to manufacture their own cancer-fighting CAR-T cells in vivo.
This approach has the potential to eliminate a number of challenges associated with traditional CAR-T approaches, the companies outlined, including the reliance on gathering patients’ own or donor cells, which are modified externally before being delivered back to the patient, and the associated time lag and manufacturing challenges of ex vivo cell modification.
Umoja has already been given undisclosed upfront payments and an equity investment by AbbVie and will also be eligible to receive up to $1.44bn in milestone payments for the two agreements combined, as well as tiered royalties.
Jonathon Sedgwick, vice president and global head of discovery research at AbbVie, said: “As we continue to strengthen our oncology portfolio, we believe that in-situ CAR-T cell therapy represents a paradigm shift utilising genetic medicine concepts.
“We look forward to working with Umoja’s team to advance next-generation in-situ CAR-T therapies and potentially expand the patient populations and indications benefitting from conventional CAR-T approaches.”
Also commenting on the agreements, Andrew Scharenberg, co-founder and chief executive officer at Umoja, said: “By bringing together AbbVie’s like-minded pursuit of addressing patient unmet needs with our investments in vector biology and fully-owned commercial-scale manufacturing, we look forward to progressing multiple VivoVec drug candidates into the clinic in the coming years.”
The AbbVie/Umoja collaboration comes just one month after AbbVie said it would be acquiring Cerevel Therapeutics for about $8.7bn, marking a significant boost to its neuroscience pipeline.
The company also recently agreed to buy cancer drug developer ImmunoGen for approximately $10.1bn, as well as Mitokinin, a discovery-stage biotechnology company developing a potential disease-modifying treatment for Parkinson’s disease, for over $650m.