The clinical-stage AI and technology company Pathos AI has announced two new licensing agreements with Chinese company Alphamab Oncology and AstraZeneca, as it looks to increase its oncology pipeline.
The firm will pay $125m upfront for the rights to research, develop, manufacture and commercialise Alphamab's JSKN016 in territories outside the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.
JSKN016 is a TROP2/HER3 bispecific antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) which has the potential to be a first-in-class treatment.
It is currently undergoing Phase III testing for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) in China, in addition to ongoing earlier-stage studies in HER2-negative breast cancer, lung cancer and other solid tumour types that express TROP2 and HER3.
Alphamab will also receive milestone payments of up to $2.09bn plus royalties on any eventual sales.
"JSKN016 represents the best of our next-generation bispecific ADC platform and we are excited to partner with Pathos," said Dr Ting Xu, Chair and CEO of Alphamab Oncology.
With Pathos's leading capabilities in AI-driven precision development, we are confident this collaboration will accelerate the global clinical advancement of JSKN016 and bring a potential breakthrough therapy to more patients with solid tumours.
The agreement with AstraZeneca will see Pathos work alongside the pharma giant to advance AZD4241, a preclinical investigational therapy for patients with oestrogen receptor-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-negative (ER+/HER2-) breast cancer, with Pathos taking responsibility for the early clinical development of the asset.
AZD4241 is an investigational oral therapy known as a PROTAC (proteolysis-targeting chimaera), specifically designed to degrade the oestrogen receptor, targeting both its normal and mutated forms.
Mutated forms of the estrogen receptor are present in up to 30-40% of patients whose disease progresses on standard hormone therapies.
AI tackles oncology’s bottleneck
Both of the drugs involved in the deals were identified through Foundry, Pathos's proprietary AI-driven decision platform for oncology drug development.
The model is trained on huge biological, clinical and real-world datasets to identify high-potential assets and design clinical trials.
“The bottleneck in oncology is not finding molecules," said Iker Huerga, CEO of Pathos AI, "It is proving they work in the right patients."
AZD4241 has a compelling mechanism. Foundry's job is to design the trial that proves it — matching this drug to the patients whose biology demands it. That is how we compress time.
Building an AI-native pipeline
The collaborations with AstraZeneca and Alphamab expand Pathos' clinical pipeline, which includes pocenbrodib, licensed from Novo Nordisk and currently in development for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) and relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma (RRMM), as well as DO-2 for MET-altered non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
All of these programmes in the Pathos pipeline have been identified, evaluated, or accelerated using the Foundry platform, which the company says reinforces its commitment to AI-native drug development.
