How hot are antibody-drug conjugates?

With less than a third of the year gone the total cash handed over up front for antibody-drug conjugates has comfortably exceeded the total for the whole of 2022. The numbers, crunched through an analysis of OncologyPipeline data, show the extent to which biopharma companies have been rushing to gain rights to ADC assets – arguably the hottest business development area of recent years.

One big question, however: can 2024 even hope to approach the astonishingly high numbers generated last year? That of course included Merck & Co’s licensing deal with Daiichi Sankyo, AbbVie’s takeover of ImmunoGen, and Pfizer’s $43bn acquisition of Seagen – though the purists might point out that the last transaction didn’t solely comprise ADC-based assets.

The data include all collaborations, licencing deals and takeovers of ADCs, as captured in the OncologyPipeline database. One shortcoming is that many transactions reveal no financial terms, and some that do cite only the total, biodollar value, without splitting out the all-important up-front fee; even so, considering that the biggest deals will come with numbers disclosed, the analysis shows the way the industry has been moving.

And of course lack of financial data doesn’t hinder an analysis of absolute deal numbers. This shows 148 separate transactions since the start of 2022, involving $65.8bn of disclosed up-front cash, plus a further $78.4bn promised in future earnouts, to yield a disclosed biodollar value for ADC transactions of $144bn.

ADC deal summary 2022-24

Note: dollar totals comprise only deals where these numbers are disclosed, but absolute numbers include all known transactions. Source: OncologyPipeline.

The biggest transactions by disclosed value will come as no surprise, including Merck & Co’s double deal for Kelun’s ADC pipeline assets, and GSK’s own double dip, licensing Hansoh ADCs against B7-H4 and B7-H3, in addition to the Merck/Daiichi, Pfizer/Seagen and AbbVie/ImmunoGen deals.

And still lucrative, but perhaps slightly more under the radar, are ADC licensing deals between Bristol Myers Squibb and SystImmune, and GSK and Mersana.

The biggest ADC transactions of 2024 so far are J&J’s $2bn acquisition of Ambrx, and Genmab’s $1.8bn move for the privately held ProfoundBio. 

Still, while the big-ticket transactions will naturally command most of the limelight, it’s the low-key moves that might be of interest in terms of keeping alive realistic hopes for most biotechs. In recent years these have included small deals between Immunome and Zentalis, Roche and MediLink, Bristol and Tubulis, Pfizer and Nona Biosciences, and Genmab and Synaffix.

It should be noted that Merck’s buy-in to Kelun’s ADCs came at a time when the Chinese company, much less its pipeline, didn't feature on most investors’ radars, and yet now this forms a key part of Merck’s ADC strategy – second only to last year’s knockout Daiichi Sankyo licence.

Selected notable 2022-24 ADC transactions

Source: OncologyPipeline.