Taiho Pharmaceutical has agreed to acquire Swiss-based antibody-drug-conjugate (ADC) specialist Araris Biotech for up to $1.14bn, representing another big-dollar deal for the promising cancer treatment modality.
The purchase agreement comprises a $400m upfront payment, with a further $740m in milestone payments. The deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2025.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Taiho is already familiar with Araris’s technology, having worked with the biotech since 2023 via an ADC collaboration targeting undisclosed oncological targets. This acquisition will see Taiho gain access to Araris’s entire ADC infrastructure, with the biotech becoming a wholly owned subsidiary.
A spin-off from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and ETH Zurich, Araris has developed linker technology that allows attachment of payloads to ‘off-the-shelf’ antibodies in a single step. The key differentiator of the biotech’s platform, called AraLinQ, allows the conjugation of two or three cytotoxic payloads simultaneously.
ADCs have become a promising therapeutic modality in oncology and are one of the fastest-growing areas in cancer drug research. Araris claims its peptide linker technology overcomes limitations in current ADC technologies such as heterogeneity, aggregation in blood, and high costs. Araris states preclinical studies have demonstrated a wider range of safety and increased antitumour effects among its candidates compared to conventional ADCs.
The Swiss biotech has three candidates at the preclinical stage that are anticipated to enter clinical trials between 2025 and 2026. Araris’s CEO Dragan Grabulovski told Pharmaceutical Technology earlier this year that nectin-four and NaPi2b are targets for two of the internal programmes; the third has not been disclosed.
“[Taiho’s] significant cancer expertise will support us in turbo-charging the clinical development of our potent ADC candidates in haematological and solid tumours,” Grabulovski said in a statement following the acquisition agreement.
Taiho’s president Masayuki Kobayashi commented: “We are confident that the addition of Araris’s knowledge, experience and technology platform in ADC drug discovery, as well as its development pipeline, will lead to further expansion and strengthening of Taiho’s drug discovery capabilities and portfolio.”
Taiho is not the only Japanese pharma company to tap Araris’s linker technology – Chugai Pharmaceutical penned a research collaboration, including a licence agreement with the biotech for up to $780m in January 2025.
Taiho’s acquisition of Araris is just the latest in a long line of deals in the ADC space, though it is still a long way short of some of the money being spent by big pharma. Pfizer – which is also researching multi-payload ADCs – acquired Seagen for $43bn in December 2023 while MSD and AbbVie have also completed $10.8bn and $10.1bn deals in recent years.
