Eli Lilly has agreed to acquire another antibody-drug conjugate biotech, swooping in for France-based Mablink Bioscience, Endpoints News has learned. The Sofinnova-backed startup is a partner of Emergence Therapeutics, the other European ADC biotech that Lilly bought earlier this year.
It marks at least the sixth acquisition for Lilly in 2023, adding to its buys in diabetes, obesity, autoimmune diseases and radioligand therapies, though the company doesn’t always disclose smaller deals, chief scientific officer Dan Skovronsky told Endpoints earlier this week.
Speaking to Endpoints on Tuesday, Lilly EVP and Loxo@Lilly president Jake Van Naarden said the Mablink deal has not yet closed. A Lilly spokesperson declined to comment on deal terms. Mablink didn’t provide a response as of publication time.
The deal is likely on the smaller side: Mablink disclosed a €31 million Series A nearly a year ago to the day. It hasn’t raised significant additional funding, according to PitchBook, which tracks venture capital raises.
The deal would add a near-term Phase I asset to Lilly’s expanding oncology pipeline, which the drugmaker has been beefing up since it bought Loxo for $8 billion in 2019. The Loxo deal has led to various cancer drug approvals, like Retevmo and Jaypirca, among other additions to the pipeline.
Five-year-old Mablink has previously said it anticipates starting a clinical trial of its folate receptor alpha-targeted ADC MBK-103 in 2024. Last November, ImmunoGen won FDA accelerated approval for its FRɑ drug, Elahere.
“We think that’s a medicine that has the potential to do even better than Elahere,” Van Naarden said. “That company had also built a novel linker technology that we think can be utilized across a variety of different programs. It’s actually the same linker that’s utilized in the Emergence Nectin-4 ADC. Assuming that the deal closes, we’ll own the linker technology as well, and utilize that more broadly.”
Mablink almost never got started, CEO Jean-Guillaume Lafay told Endpoints after the company’s October 2022 Series A round.
“Nobody wanted” a patent out of University of Lyon researchers who had developed a hydrophilic drug-linker platform for ADCs, Lafay told Endpoints at the time. He created the company in late 2018 and combined it with Lina Therapeutics, another biotech from the Lyon researchers.
“If you link too much payload on the antibody, you have the same problem as chemotherapy. The idea of the scientists of Mablink has been to shield, to mask the presence, of the payload so they develop a polymer, polysarcosine, and develop a new link between the payload and the monoclonal antibody,” Lafay previously told Endpoints.
