Taiho buys Swiss biotech and its ADC tech for $400M
Japan-based Taiho Pharmaceuticals on Monday said it will acquire Switzerland’s Araris Biotech and its antibody-drug conjugate technology for $400 million upfront.
The two companies have worked together since 2023, when they agreed to use Araris’ technology to explore and develop new drug candidates aimed at targets chosen by Taiho. The deal announced Monday, which they expect to close in the first half of this year, could hand Araris up to $740 million more if certain milestones are met.
Antibody-drug conjugates, or ADCs, pair tumor-killing toxins with a targeting molecule via a “linker.” Improvements in this linking technology have helped buoy the field, yielding new treatments and sparking greater investment. Many large pharmaceutical companies, among them AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Merck & Co, have inked multibillion-dollar deals to pad their pipelines with ADC prospects. AstraZeneca, together with its partner Daiichi Sankyo, have arguably had the most success recently with their ADC drugs Enhertu and Datroway.
Spun off from the Paul Scherrer Institute six years ago, Araris was funded by 4BIO Capital in 2020 and again in 2022. The biotech touts its “AraLinQ” technology, which it claims can provide more stable and more potent ADCs. It is developing three candidates for blood and solid tumors, and expects to advance these prospects into clinical testing this year and next.
“Araris’ unique ADC technology represents a quantum leap for the ADC field, potentially offering precise payload delivery of multiple mechanisms of action simultaneously to the tumor, with less toxicity,” Dragan Grabulovski, CEO and co-founder of Araris, said in a statement.
Taiho, a subsidiary of Japan’s Otsuka, sells several cancer drugs in the U.S: Lytgobi for bile duct cancer, Lonsurf for colorectal cancer and the myelodysplastic syndromes treatment Inqovi. It also markets other anticancer medicines in Japan.
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