Nurix Announces Strategic Collaboration with Seagen

Nurix Therapeutics announced on Sept. 7, 2023 that it has entered a multi-year, multi-target strategic collaboration agreement with Seagen, to further advance a new class of medicines, called degrader-antibody conjugates (DAC), for use in cancer treatment. According to the press release, the collaboration between the two companies will focus on an innovative approach to combine two powerful technologies to target cancer, antibody-drug conjugation (ADC) and targeted protein degradation (TPD), with the intention of creating drugs with new mechanisms of action, improved specificity, and anti-cancer activity.

“By combining the tissue and tumor specificity of antibodies with highly potent and catalytic targeted degradation of cancer driver proteins, we believe that DACs may represent a next generation of cancer medicine for a wide range of solid tumors and hematologic malignancies,” said Arthur T. Sands, MD, PhD, president and chief executive officer of Nurix, in a press release. “With Seagen, our strategic goal is to advance ADC technology to the next level to provide patients with new DAC drugs that deliver greater anti-tumor efficacy and safety compared to currently available agents.”

According to the agreement terms, Nurix will receive an upfront payment of $60 million and the potential to receive up to approximately $3.4 billion in research, development, regulatory, and commercial milestone payments across multiple programs. Further, as a part of the multi-year collaboration, Nurix will use its proprietary DELigase platform to develop a suite of targeted protein degraders against multiple targets nominated by Seagen that are fitting for antibody conjugation. According to the press release, Seagen will be responsible for conjugating these degraders to antibodies to make DACs and advancing these DAC drug candidates through preclinical and clinical development and commercialization.

“The targeted protein degrader modality provides unique advantages over payloads currently employed across the ADC field,” said Gwenn M. Hansen, PhD, chief scientific officer of Nurix, in a press release. “This collaboration is a new application of our DELigase technology, and we are delighted to work with Seagen, a pioneer in the development and commercialization of ADC therapeutics, to create a new generation of drugs to fight cancer.”

Source: Nurix