Peregrine Pharmaceuticals Enters Into Licensing Agreement With Medarex to Develop Vascular Targeting Agents
Thursday August 25, 11:54 am ET
Agreement Represents the Third Licensing Collaboration Under Peregrine's Vascular Targeting Agent Platform Technology
[It is not immediately clear to me what has been licensed and why. Anti-PSMA is supposedly directed towards prostate cancer cells. However PSMA is also said to be common in the vasculature feeding other types of cancers.
This licensing appears to indicate that Medarex is not intending to direct their second generation and now conjugated anti-PSMA antibodies towards prostate cancers, but against the vasculature of other types of cancers. Maybe just as well, as Millennium is way ahead of them with MLN2704 in the prostate cancer setting].
TUSTIN, Calif., Aug. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Peregrine Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: PPHM - News), a biopharmaceutical company with a broad portfolio of products under development directed towards the treatment of cancer, viruses and other diseases, announced today that it has entered into a license agreement with Medarex, Inc. (Nasdaq: MEDX - News). Under the agreement, the company licensed to Medarex certain intellectual property rights under its broad Vascular Targeting Agent technology platform. This license allows Medarex to develop and commercialize their anti-PSMA monoclonal antibody conjugated to therapeutic agents and use the resulting conjugate for the treatment of a wide range of solid tumors.
Under the terms of the agreement, Peregrine Pharmaceuticals will receive an upfront payment and annual maintenance fees and may receive future payments based on the achievement of clinical milestones and a royalty on net sales if a product developed under the agreement is approved under the FDA. Further financial details were not disclosed.
"Peregrine's broad VTA intellectual property portfolio creates a number of opportunities for partnering and licensing as indicated by this licensing agreement and those completed earlier. These types of deals should add considerable value to the company as our partners move their VTA development programs forward," stated David Sherris, Ph.D., Peregrine's Head of Business Development. "We look forward to continuing discussions and entering into additional partnering arrangements with companies working in the vascular targeting area."
About Vascular Targeting Agents (VTAs)
The VTA technology is based on the concept that virtually all detectable tumors rely on a vascular network to obtain oxygen and nutrients. Peregrine's Vascular Targeting Agent technology platform is comprised of broad intellectual property rights covering products that selectively bind to components of tumor vasculature and deliver a therapeutic payload that causes damage to the tumor vasculature resulting in an avalanche of tumor cell death. VTAs utilize monoclonal antibodies and other targeting agents that recognize markers found on tumor blood vessels but not on normal blood vessels. VTAs could be very potent anti-tumor agents because they create two amplified processes that have a devastating effect on the tumor. The first process is the initiation of the coagulation cascade, which is a self-sustaining chain reaction in which a huge number of blood clotting molecules are generated, ultimately leading to complete occlusion of the tumor blood vessels within a matter of minutes. A second process occurs at the structural level where the blockage of a single capillary can lead to the destruction of thousands of tumor cells. As a result, small quantities of VTAs localized in the tumor's vascular system may cause an avalanche of tumor cell death. VTAs have the potential to be effective against a wide variety of solid tumors since: 1) the solid tumors studied to date in excess of two millimeters in size form a vascular network to enable the tumor to continue to grow, and 2) tumor vasculature markers are believed to be consistent across various tumor types. |
