Roche's $490 million acquisition of dual specific antibody platform dutamab to consolidate the leading position in therapeutic antibody field

Source: Biovalley December 19, 2014 Roche, a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, recently announced the acquisition of dutalys, an Austrian biotechnology company, for us $489 million, an expert in the discovery and development of bispecific antibodies At present, bispecific antibody therapy is a very popular new technology In the field of cancer treatment, it has been proved to be more effective than the traditional antibody According to the agreement, Roche will pay an upfront payment of $133.75 million and an additional milestone payment of up to $355 million after reaching a specific milestone, bringing the transaction price to $489 million Through the acquisition of dutalys, Roche obtained the platform dutamab, which will provide novel bispecific antibody drugs for multiple therapeutic fields According to Roche, the dutamab platform will be added to its own bispecific antibody development system, crossmab The deal will strengthen Roche's leading position in the field of therapeutic antibodies In this field, Roche already has some heavyweight products with annual sales of billions of dollars, including Avastin, Herceptin, rituxan, perjeta, kadcyla, gazyva, etc In addition to these heavyweight products, there are a variety of experimental antibody drugs in the Roche antibody pipeline, which are developed for the treatment of cancer, coronary artery disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, etc Bispecific antibody is a kind of artificial protein, which is composed of two different monoclonal antibody fragments and can combine two different parts of the disease pathway Roche believes that the all humanized bispecific antibody developed by dutamab technology has particularly good binding and stability Dutalys, a private pharmaceutical company, was founded in April 2010 with seed funding from the Austrian wirtschaftsservice, research funding from the Austrian research promotion agency and the Vienna science and Technology Bureau, and funding from the Austrian academic business incubator.