WuXi STA, a subsidiary of WuXi AppTec, and Coherent Biopharma have announced the signing of a strategic partnership agreement, which will see WuXi become a 'preferred' CDMO partner to the PDC developer. The CDMO will provide integrated CMC services to advance Coherent's present and future drug candidates from API to drug product, including but not limited to process development, manufacturing, analytical and regulatory filing support.
In recent years, peptide drug conjugates (PDC) have increasingly attracted attention from pharmaceutical companies with advantages including as strong tumour permeation, good scalability and relatively good pharmacokinetics. Coherent is dedicated to R&D and commercialisation of tumour-targeting ligand-mediated drugs and tumour markers. Based on its BEST (Bi-Engaging ligand-mediated Selective Targeting) technology platform, the company has developed a product pipeline with the PDC products, including CBP-1008 and CBP-1018, the two PDC drugs are both in clinical trials in the United States and China. Meanwhile, multiple drugs are in various R&D stages, planned for clinical development in the upcoming years.
PDC drugs have broad applications, but development faces many technical challenges. With WuXi's capability and capacity for small molecule, peptide, high potency API and complex conjugate development, the company will provide a support for Coherent's PDC drug candidate development.
WuXi's peptide platform covers from unnatural amino acid, conjugate, peptide API to drug product, which the company couples with analytical support and CMC writing services.
Dr Baohua Huang, Chair and GM of Coherent Biopharma, said: “We are very happy to enhance our partnership with WuXi STA to the next level, who is well known for its world-class scientific and technical strengths and industry leading end-to-end services, which offers great support to our PDC drugs. I am confident that our cooperation will accelerate the pathway of our cancer drugs to market for the benefit of global patients.”
Dr Minzhang Chen, Co-CEO of WuXi AppTec and CEO of WuXi STA, said: “We are pleased to form a strategic partnership with Coherent Biopharma. Coherent is one of the pioneers in the development of PDC drugs in China and has made great progress. We are looking forward to further leveraging our proven integrated CMC platform, along with our global standard quality systems, to accelerate Coherent's innovative drug development and ultimately benefit global patients.”
