Avenzo Therapeutics, a well-funded biotech that has in-licensed treatment candidates from Chinese drug developers, has forged its third deal since reassembling much of the Turning Point Therapeutics crew.
Athena Countouriotis’ San Diego biotech is tapping en vogue startup DualityBio for access to a bispecific antibody-drug conjugate in a space that attracted Bristol Myers Squibb’s interest in 2023.
Avenzo is dishing out $50 million upfront for the ex-China rights to DualityBio’s preclinical EGFRxHER3 bispecific, the company told
Endpoints News
exclusively. The candidate is codenamed DB-1418 and will also be known as AVZO-1418 going forward.
As ADCs have become one of the pharmaceutical industry’s oncology drug modalities of choice in recent years — leading to many buyouts, megaround financings and treatment approvals — drugmakers have turned to bispecific versions of the decades-old space to bring it into the future.
Bristol Myers had paid
$800 million upfront
for SystImmune’s bispecific going after the same targets in 2023. The key difference: SystImmune had
already entered
Phase 1 testing by the time it signed that deal. Countouriotis, Avenzo’s founder and CEO, told Endpoints that her company expects AVZO-1418/DB-1418 to enter a human trial this year in the US and potentially Australia. In an interview, she said Avenzo could explore the ADC in lung, breast and bladder cancer.
Duality has described DB-1418 as having a “1+1” format that could lead to better binding to tumor cells, sparing more healthy cells in the process.
“As it relates to EGFRxHER3, there’s obviously one that dictated a very big number upfront last year with a partnership with BMS, and we saw holes in that asset right away as it relates specifically to the safety profile, as well as some of the preclinical data that we have with the Duality asset,” Countouriotis said. “We think it can be best in class. It’s not far behind. There’s nothing approved.”
The Avenzo team is quite familiar with BMS. The New York pharma acquired Countouriotis’ Turning Point for
$4.1 billion in 2022
and subsequently got FDA approval for its lung cancer drug
Augtyro
. Many of those Turning Point employees have reunited at Avenzo.
For its part, DualityBio has quickly become one of the leading ADC partners.
Within five years of its inception, the biotech discovered about a dozen ADCs, according to its August
application
to
list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange
. And it has inked partnerships with
BeiGene
,
Adcendo
,
BioNTech
and, last month,
GSK
.
“In a time where you’re seeing a lot of deals coming out of China, Duality is a company that has aspirations to go public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, but also that has shown the validity of their team and their platform with the multiple deals that they’ve done before,” Countouriotis said. “For us to slide in after BioNTech, BeiGene and GSK — which are obviously much bigger than Avenzo — I’m pretty excited that they chose us as a partner.”
DualityBio stands to gain
billions
of dollars from its tie-ups. With regard to the new Avenzo collaboration, it could receive up to about $1.15 billion in biobucks.
Avenzo has promised a total of about $3 billion in milestone payments across its three deals. It’ll likely be multiple years before it has to deliver significant chunks of those biobucks, though, and the company has raised ample capital to get clinical data on its assets. Avenzo has 17 investors and has raised about $386 million to date.
The biotech’s DualityBio collaboration follows its recent option to snag
VelaVigo
’s Nectin-4/TROP2 bispecific ADC, and a January 2024 deal for
Allorion Therapeutics
’ CDK2 inhibitor. The company had been interested in DLL3-targeting ADCs at one point, but it was “very crowded, everyone has one and everyone’s in Phase 1,” Countouriotis said.
Roche
and
Ideaya Biosciences
both struck DLL3 pacts in the ADC space in recent weeks.
With three deals in tow, Avenzo is likely all set on its pipeline for now. It has about 40 employees and will nearly double in headcount this year, Countouriotis said. The workforce growth will focus on clinical development and financial expertise as Avenzo ramps up trials and gets closer to an IPO, she said.