NEW YORK – Caris Life Sciences and Xencor have entered into a discovery and licensing agreement to research, develop, and commercialize XmAb bispecific antibodies directed against new targets for the treatment of cancer patients.
Under the terms of the agreement, Caris will work on identifying new targets for bispecific antibody drug candidates using its proprietary Caris Discovery platform. The multiomic discovery platform integrates the company's aptamer-based ADAPT proteomic profiling platform, its real-world data CODEai platform, and its validation pipeline.
ADAPT uses an aptamer library to profile biological samples at a systems-wide scale, while the CODEai platform integrates the company's molecular data catalog with cancer treatment information and clinical outcomes data for more than 215,000 patients covering more than 1 million data points per patient.
For its part of the agreement, Xencor will receive exclusive options to research, develop, and commercialize products directed to up to three targets.
Caris will receive an upfront payment and will be eligible to receive up to approximately $120 million in license fees and discovery, development, regulatory, and sales-based milestones, in addition to royalty payments on net sales of each product Xencor commercializes. Caris will also obtain future rights for molecular profiling and companion diagnostics related to drug candidates developed under the collaboration.
"Our collaboration with Xencor will combine Caris' proprietary, multiomics target discovery engine and Xencor's XmAb engineering platform to design and manufacture investigational bispecific antibodies to develop first-in-class therapies for patients with cancer," David Spetzler, Caris' president and CSO, said in a statement.
Caris has entered into several collaborative agreements this year, including a partnership with electronic health records firm Epic to integrate Caris' molecular testing portfolio with Epic's Orders and Results Anywhere network, and with Sorrento and the Prostate Cancer Clinical Trial Consortium, who will make use of Caris' Molecular Intelligence Profile multi-platform tumor profiling test.