Gilead Sciences has entered into three multi-year partnerships with Tentarix Biotherapeutics for the discovery and development of new therapies for oncology and inflammatory diseases.

Utilising Tentarix’s Tentacles platform, the partnership aims to explore and develop multifunctional, conditional protein therapeutics.

Designed to improve therapeutic advantages while maintaining safety, these molecules have the capacity to selectively target immune cells associated with disease pathways, without activating other immune cells that could lead to adverse events.

Tentarix Biotherapeutics president and CEO Paul Grayson stated: “Our technology has great promise and collaborating with Gilead to build out this pipeline helps broaden the development of multifunctional, antibody-based therapeutics, providing an excellent mechanism to validate our science with the ultimate goal of bringing these potential medicines to patients faster.”

Tentarix will receive $66m from Gilead as upfront payments and equity investment as part of the three collaborations.

Gilead can also purchase up to three specific subsidiaries of Tentarix, which encompass the programmes resulting from the collaborations, for $80m per subsidiary.

Gilead Sciences Research executive vice-president Flavius Martin stated: “This early-stage collaboration with Tentarix will be highly synergistic to our ongoing efforts, building upon our growing strength in protein therapeutics, and may provide access to next-generation, multi-specific biologics.”

In August 2023, Arcus Biosciences and Gilead terminated the development of etrumadenant for castrate-resistant prostate cancer after the drug showed an underwhelming response on radiographic progression-free survival in an ongoing trial.