Gilead will work with fellow California biotech Cartography Biosciences to find new targets for breast and lung cancer medicines, the companies said Tuesday morning.
The deal includes $20 million upfront and an undisclosed amount in milestone payments, plus potential tiered royalties, the pair said. The deal focuses on triple-negative breast cancer and adenocarcinoma, the most prevalent type of non-small cell lung cancer.
It marks the first pharma partnership for Cartography, which emerged with $57 million in the summer of 2022. The nimble startup will use its so-called ATLAS and SUMMIT platforms to find single and paired targets that Gilead can elect to drug against with its own therapies.
ATLAS finds single targets, while the newer SUMMIT platform helps to “dramatically expand the search space” by combing through two-antigen target combinations, founder and CEO Kevin Parker told Endpoints News.
“We need new mechanisms to target tumors. We need new ways to reach patients. It feels like the elephant in the room for the biopharma space in that we’re iterating and engineering better and better drug modalities, but running out of targets to develop them against,” Parker said in an interview. “If you don’t have those good targets, you’re leaving patients behind.”
Gilead will decide which modalities it uses to drug the targets, Parker said. In oncology, the drugmaker markets cell therapies by way of its Kite Pharma unit, as well as the antibody-drug conjugate Trodelvy and the PI3 kinase inhibitor Zydelig, which has run into confirmatory trial hurdles in the past.
Cartography’s internal pipeline is led by a T cell engager for colorectal cancer, called CB21. The 45-employee startup will have more information on the timing of its CB21 clinical development plans later this year, Parker said. Colorectal cancer is the “second leading cause of death in oncology in the US,” he added.
Gilead has been active on the external hunt for new oncology medicines as it seeks to have 20 or more indication approvals in cancer by the end of this decade. It has recently lined up partnerships with Xilio Therapeutics, Merus and others. Meanwhile, it’s pulled back on its CD47 work in oncology, casting further shadows on its $4.9 billion Forty Seven acquisition.