Two days after joining the antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) race, Roche has signed another cancer-focused licensing deal.
The Swiss pharma is handing over $66 million upfront to access Moma Therapeutics’ KnowledgeBase platform with the aim of identifying and developing “a certain number of novel drug targets involved in promoting cancer cell growth and survival,” Moma said in a Jan. 4 release.
As well as the upfront cash, Roche has pledged discovery, development and commercialization milestones that could potentially top out at over $2 billion, along with a slice of the royalties. Moma will oversee the initial work on the targets—the exact number of which was not disclosed in the release—through to the selection of candidates, with Roche then taking the baton for IND-enabling activities, clinical trials and hopefully on to commercialization.
If a number of drugs make it into pivotal clinical trials, Moma also retains the right to fund the late-stage development of one of these candidates in return for a larger share of the U.S. royalties.
Moma’s goal is to discover the next generation of precision medicines by going after disease-causing proteins known as the ATPase class of enzymes. A few successful drugs, such as Vertex's cystic fibrosis therapy Kalydeco, already target these enzymes, but there is plenty of potential still to explore. Moma has gone all-in, constructing a pipeline around the proteins.
“The vision for this collaboration was crafted jointly with Roche to enable each party to bring its strengths in pursuit of this shared goal,” Moma CEO Asit Parikh, M.D., Ph.D., said in the release. “It also contributes to the long-term sustainability of Moma’s core focus as we advance our rich pipeline of precision oncology programs to the clinic.”
James Sabry, M.D., Ph.D., global head of pharma partnering at Roche, said the collaboration will “combine our leadership in oncology with Moma’s deep expertise in drug discovery for difficult-to-drug and novel targets in oncology.”
“The broader field of cancer dependencies is of high importance for Roche and we are looking forward to further deepening our knowledge and discovering novel targets involved in cancer cell growth and survival leveraging Moma’s innovative platform,” Sabry added.
Moma secured $150 million in series B funding back in May 2022, which the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech said at the time would be used to accelerate one or more of its five oncology programs to the clinic by mid-2024. In today’s release, the company now said it’s aiming to bring “two high-impact programs to the clinic next year.”
While Moma has kept its head down since then, Roche has been on a roll recently. The Big Pharma joined the ADC arms race on Tuesday in a $1 billion biobucks deal with China’s MediLink for exclusive rights to YL211, a mesenchymal epidermal transforming factor ADC under development for solid tumors. Roche also kicked off December by muscling in on that other hot spot of biotech dealmaking when it scooped up obesity-focused Carmot for $2.7 billion.