Roche is paying Dualitas Therapeutics $36.5 million upfront to screen over 300,000 novel bispecific combinations in search of new treatments for immunology and inflammation diseases.
Dualitas launched a year ago with $65 million in series A funding to advance a pipeline led by treatments for allergic and autoimmune diseases. The pipeline was built on DualScreen, a technology that enables Dualitas to screen cell surface targets at scale. Rather than designing bispecifics based on known biology, the biotech uses its high-throughput screening technology to find novel pairs of targets.
Roche has signed up to access the fruits of the platform in a project that Dualitas has claimed is “one of the largest-scale bispecific discovery endeavors.” Dualitas will functionally screen combinations to find and develop bispecifics, before handing over to Roche for everything from preclinical development onward.
As programs advance, Roche could pay R&D and commercial milestone payments that ultimately bring the potential deal value to $1 billion. The agreement also features tiered royalties. Assets discovered through the partnership will hopefully follow in the footsteps of bispecifics that Roche has brought to market, like Columvi, Hemlibra, Lunsumio and Vabysmo.
Roche’s portfolio covers oncology, an early focus for bispecific developers, as well as hemophilia A and eye diseases. Partnering with Dualitas furthers Roche’s work to explore the modality outside of cancer, which has already seen the Big Pharma start bispecific trials in indications including ulcerative colitis and lupus.
With the upfront payment, Dualitas has topped up its bank balance ahead of clinical development of its in-house programs next year. The biotech’s pipeline is led by DTX-102, a bispecific antibody that engages CD28 to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Preclinical tests show DTX-102 is more potent than a commercially approved agent and could have more favorable dosing, Dualitas said.
Executives familiar to Roche are overseeing Dualitas’ R&D pipeline. Greg Lazar, Ph.D., formerly of Roche’s Genentech, co-founded Dualitas and serves as its chief scientific officer. Karim Dabbagh, Ph.D., who led inflammation pharmacology at Roche early in his career, joined Dualitas as CEO in June.