26 July 2018 - - South San Francisco, California-based clinical-stage drug discovery, development and manufacturing company Sutro Biopharma, Inc. has signed a collaboration and licensing agreement with Merck, known as MSD outside the US and Canada, to discover and develop novel immune-modulating therapies for cancer and autoimmune disorders, the company said.
The research and development activities will leverage Sutro's proprietary cell-free protein synthesis and site-specific conjugation platforms, which facilitate precision design and rapid empirical optimisation of protein conjugates, to discover and develop best-in-class immune-modulating cytokine derivatives for both oncology and autoimmune indications.
Under the agreement, Sutro will be primarily responsible for preclinical research and Merck will gain exclusive worldwide rights to therapeutic candidates derived from the collaboration.
Sutro will receive an upfront payment of USD 60m and is eligible for milestone payments totaling up to USD 1.6bn associated with the development and sale of all therapeutic candidates and all possible indications identified under the collaboration, as well as tiered royalties on the sale of products.
Sutro Biopharma is a creating a broad variety of next-generation protein therapeutics for oncology based on its proprietary, cell-free protein synthesis platform, XpressCF.
The company designs cytokine-based immuno-oncology therapies, antibody-drug conjugates, and bispecific antibodies primarily directed at clinically-validated targets for which the current standard of care is suboptimal.