Mercedon and Artiva have agreed to a $1.8 billion partnership to develop new treatments for CAR-NK cell therapy

On January 28th Artiva Biotherapeutics, an oncology company focused on the development and commercialization of major isogenetic natural killing (NK) cell therapies for cancer, announced that it had entered into a global exclusive partnership and licensing agreement with Mercedon to develop new methods of chimeric antigen-NK cell therapy for solid tumor-related antigens.
the collaboration will leverage Artiva's ready-made isogene NK cell manufacturing platform and its proprietary CAR-NK technology.
and Mercedon has obtained two off-the-job global licenses for the CAR-NK program for solid tumors from Artiva.
, Mercado paid an advance of $30 million and a milestone payment that could be several times that price in the future.
has established Keytruda as a cornerstone of cancer treatment in recent years, but has been on the sidelines as some of its pharmaceutical peers move into cell therapy.
view is that cell therapy is inactive, and while the first CAR-T therapies were groundbreaking for some patients with blood cancer, the field needs to make significant progress in treating solid tumors and mass-producing cell therapies.
, for now, Mercadon appears to have identified Artiva as a biotech company capable of making these advances and led its partnership in the development of CAR-NK therapies.
$30 million in advance covers both treatments.
a third treatment, but will have to pay an additional $15 million, with milestones of up to $612 million for each project.
, when all drugs are successful, Mercadon could end up paying more than $1.8 billion.
reported that the cell therapy involved in the deal was based on NK cells, not T cells found in early CAR-T.
NK cells have a number of potential advantages over T cells, including the ability to penetrate tumors and protect them from transplant-resistant host diseases, simplifying the creation of ready-made therapies.
these advantages have attracted a growing number of companies, including Fate Therapeutics and Nkarta.
under the terms of the agreement, Artiva will develop the project until their first GMP production project and new drug clinical research registration declaration (IND) are completed.
will take over clinical and commercial development, building on its oncology expertise as Keytruda grows.
Artiva's role in the project builds on its experience in developing internal candidates, and the current in-house research and development pipeline is led by the clinically-staged drug candidate AB-101, a generic NK cell therapy used in combination with monoclonal antibodies or natural cell joiners.
the company is currently advancing clinical trials of AB-101 Uniloximab for the treatment of recurring or refractic B-cell lymphoma.
In addition, the company's pipeline has two other preclinical CAR-NK therapies, AB-201 (a new HER2-specific CAR-NK cell therapy for the treatment of HER2-plus solid tumors) and AB-202 (a CD19-specific CAR-NK cell therapy for the treatment of B-cell malignancies), which are scheduled to enter clinical trials in 2022.
artiva points out that the use of CARs to target cell therapy can improve the therapeutic activity and specificity of the drug.
Artiva uses cord blood as the starting material for her treatment, which is rich in NK cells.
, however, other NK cell therapy developers, including Fat Therapeutics, argue that inducing erythrogenic stem cells is preferable because of their scalability and homogeneity.