Roche’s Genentech is paying Earendil Labs $55 million upfront to discover and develop multiple bispecific antibodies. The deal, which focuses on oncology, includes milestones that could take the deal's value above $1.5 billion.
Earendil has made waves over the past 18 months. Sanofi paid $125 million for two bispecifics in April 2025 and put down another $160 million in upfront and near-term milestones for more bispecifics in January. The deals could collectively be worth more than $4 billion in milestones. Meanwhile, Earendil struck an $885 million deal with WuXi XDC for antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) technology in February and raised $787 million in March.
While Sanofi tapped Earendil for autoimmune disease bispecific antibodies, Genentech has turned to the deep-pocketed startup for assets to stock its oncology pipeline. Earendil will lead antibody discovery and research on bispecifics against pre-agreed target combinations in oncology.
The biotech will advance the programs through early clinical development before handing them off to Genentech for global clinical trials and commercialization. Genentech will pay development, regulatory and sales milestones, plus tiered royalties on net product sales, as the programs advance.
News of Genentech’s agreement dropped one week after Roche, its parent company, paid Dualitas Therapeutics $36.5 million to screen over 300,000 novel bispecific combinations. Roche’s deal focused on immunology and inflammation diseases.
Neither Genentech nor Earendil has disclosed the targets chosen for their programs. But Earendil co-CEO Zhenping Zhu, M.D., Ph.D., outlined the high-level rationale for developing anticancer bispecifics, saying in a statement that tumor growth and metastasis depend on multiple and interactive pathways, “making it especially challenging for therapies directed at a single mechanism to achieve durable benefit.”
With bispecifics, one molecule can address complementary disease biology, leading Earendil to apply its drug discovery platform to the modality. Earendil has pitched the AI-enabled platform as a way to design antibody sequences “at massive scale.” The platform includes tools for predicting antibody properties and optimizing molecules.
Earendil has used the platform to build a broad early-stage pipeline across immunology, inflammation and oncology. ADCs, particularly assets with bispecific targeting molecules, dominate Earendil’s cancer pipeline. The biotech is also developing several T-cell engagers, the most advanced of which engage two distinct, non-overlapping epitopes of GUCY2C and DLL3. Earendil also has a CEACAM5xCDH17 bispecific.