Roche's Chugai Pharmaceutical is starting off its centennial year by spending some Swiss cheese. The Japanese unit is tapping Zurich-based Araris Biotech to develop new antibody-drug conjugates, which nets Araris an upfront fee and up to $780 million in potential milestone payments.
Chugai’s chosen targets have not been disclosed, and Araris is also eligible to earn royalties on product sales, according to a Jan. 8 release.
Chugai will pay for Araris’ research activities. After exercising an option for resulting ADCs, the Big Pharma company will also handle development, manufacturing and global commercialization, according to the release.
"This second collaboration with a large pharmaceutical company is a testimony of the attractiveness of our highly differentiated ADC platform and its potential to generate innovative ADCs,” Araris Chief Scientific Officer Philipp Spycher, Ph.D., said in the release.
That first collaboration came in November 2023, when Araris entered a research collaboration (PDF) with another Japanese pharma, Otsuka's Taiho Pharmaceutical, to develop ADCs for cancer targets.
Araris will use its linker-conjugation platform, AraLinQTM, to build the ADCs. The firm published details of its tech in ChemBioChem in September 2024. The platform is designed for attaching multiple payloads to an antibody.
Chugai was founded in 1925 and became a part of the Roche Group in 2002. The firm is headquartered in Tokyo and employs more than 7,500 people.