Clinical stage oncology firm Oxford BioTherapeutics has signed a deal with the open-access biologics technology platform company WuXi Biologics, in a deal worth more than $450 million.

The alliance has come as part of an effort to develop and commercialise five novel bispecific antibodies as treatments for several different cancers, through the use of WuXi Biologics WuXiBody Platform.

Under the terms of the deal, WuXi Biologics will receive an undisclosed amount, in addition to development, regulatory and commercial milestones worth up to $450 million. WuXi will also receive royalties based on global sales of the bispecific antibodies.

"Our immuno-oncology (IO) collaboration with WuXi Biologics, around the WuXiBody bispecific platform and clinical mid-stage PD-L1 antibody, is a significant step for OBT to deepen and broaden our exciting first-in-class IO pipeline," said Dr. Christian Rohlff, Chief Executive Officer of Oxford BioTherapeutics.

"Combining OBT's novel second generation IO medicines with a major check-point pathway into a single entity, with potential broad utility across many solid and liquid tumor types, is designed to generate novel therapies for patients who do not benefit from the existing IO medicines. Novel products from this collaboration, which combine multiple treatment modalities into a single agent, will improve the risk/benefit ratio, reduce costs and optimize future commercial potential. This deal will allow us to clearly differentiate our product development strategies from existing IO therapies and to generate products that will play a key role in shaping the future treatment landscape for oncology. Products from this deal are expected to play a key role in OBT's commitment to curing cancer."

"We are excited to expand our strategic partnership with OBT to include the proprietary WuXiBody platform. This is the 3rd partnership we signed since we globally launched this exciting platform this September," Dr. Chris Chen, Chief Executive Officer of WuXi Biologics commented.

"Quick adoption of our proprietary WuXiBody bispecific platform further validates our beliefs that this platform addresses most technical limitations of current bispecific platforms and can potentially tremendously reduce the cost of making these biologics. We have achieved 16g/L in cell culture titer, 95+% purity after one-step Protein A purification and 95+% step yield for Protein A step. WuXi Biologics will continue to invest to develop next-generation globally leading technologies to transform biologics discovery, development and manufacturing."

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