Israeli Company Licenses Cancer Drug To US Firm For $848M

An Israeli drug developer will exclusively license its preclinical cancer treatment to a leading American biopharma firm in a deal worth $848 million.

Compugen uses its computational abilities to screen vast amounts of publicly available datasets as well as its own proprietary datasets to identify compounds that can create potentially new immunotherapy drugs.

Its COM503 drug can block the interaction between the protein IL-18 and Interleukin-18, a cytokine (or signaling protein) that controls the growth and activity of immune cells and blood cells – in other words, the immune system’s ability to mount a defense against germs and other substances.

IL-18 balances the activity of Interleukin-18, because if the body has too many immune cells, they will attack the body’s own tissues. This results in autoimmune diseases such as Crohn’s and rheumatoid arthritis. 

COM503 blocks the interaction between the two so that Interleukin-18 will be free to inhibit tumor growth in cancer patients. 

Under the new agreement, Compugen will be responsible for the ongoing preclinical development and future Phase 1 study of COM503.

After that point, the American biopharma firm Gilead Sciences will have the exclusive right to develop and commercialize COM503.

It will pay Compugen $60 million upfront and $30 million once the US Food and Drug administration clears the drug for use in clinical trials.

Compugen will also be eligible to receive up to an additional $758 million in future development and commercial milestone payments, as well as royalties on sales.

“We are delighted to enter into this collaboration with Gilead and believe that Gilead’s confidence in our differentiated approach to harness cytokine biology for cancer therapeutics speaks to the quality of our computational discovery capabilities as well as our ability to translate our novel discoveries into investigational drugs in the clinic and we look forward to working together to bring new treatment options to patients,” said Dr. Anat Cohen-Dayag, CEO of Compugen.

“IL-18 is one of the rare cytokines which is naturally inhibited by an endogenous binding protein, presenting a unique opportunity to use a blocking antibody to increase the local concentrations of IL-18 within the tumor where it can potentiate anti-tumor immune responses, thereby potentially overcoming the limitations of systemically administered cytokines.”