Going to China? ADC Therapeutics spotlights a new way to do it with Hillhouse-backed Overland - Endpoints News

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Chris Mar­tin and his crew at ADC Ther­a­peu­tics went in­to the JP Mor­gan Health­care con­fer­ence this Jan­u­ary armed with pos­i­tive piv­otal da­ta for its lead an­ti­body-drug con­ju­gate, lon­cas­tux­imab tesirine. Hav­ing fo­cused its de­vel­op­ment pro­gram ex­clu­sive­ly in the US and Eu­rope, it was time to find a Chi­nese part­ner.

The search, which stretched out over the next few months, cul­mi­nat­ed in six term sheets, from large phar­ma, on­col­o­gy spe­cial­ists and all. But one bid­der stood out: Over­land Phar­ma, the fledg­ling plat­form play co-found­ed by ven­ture part­ners at Hill­house Cap­i­tal, a mar­quee VC firm Mar­tin has come to re­spect.

“It was a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent struc­ture,” he told End­points News.

In­stead of sim­ply li­cens­ing lon­ca, Over­land pro­posed start­ing a joint ven­ture — one AD­CT would own 49% of — to house the Greater Chi­na and Sin­ga­pore rights to a to­tal of four AD­Cs in the Swiss biotech’s port­fo­lio, with $50 mil­lion in up­front in­vest­ment from Hill­house. The team of 30-plus Over­land staffers would ini­tial­ly shoul­der much of the lo­cal de­vel­op­ment and reg­u­la­to­ry work, both start­ing bridg­ing stud­ies de­signed specif­i­cal­ly for the li­censed ter­ri­to­ries and loop­ing them in­to glob­al tri­als. ADC will send the same num­ber of reps to the board of di­rec­tors as Over­land.

As the bio­phar­ma world learned last week with Over­land’s de­but, the start­up is pitch­ing it­self as a spring­board for West­ern drug de­vel­op­ers to bring not just prod­ucts, but their cut­ting-edge tech­nolo­gies to Chi­na through plat­form plays.

To be sure, joint ven­tures in Chi­na are noth­ing new. In the most promi­nent ex­am­ple, CAR-T pi­o­neers Kite, Juno and the less­er known Sin­ga­pore­an cell ther­a­py biotech Tes­sa have all set up JVs with lo­cal com­pa­nies — al­beit go­ing with hefty, es­tab­lished play­ers in the phar­ma scene.

On the sur­face, Over­land is more like Zai Lab, Ever­est Med­i­cines or even Per­cep­tive’s Lian­Bio in that it’s small­er and built ex­plic­it­ly to source for­eign in­no­va­tion in­to Chi­na. But be­hind it is an ex­ten­sive ecosyt­sem, from a net­work of CROs and man­u­fac­tur­ers to a com­mer­cial sales force, that Hill­house has as­sem­bled over the years.

Both part­ners have am­bi­tious goals for Over­land AD­CT Bio­phar­ma, which Mar­tin en­vi­sions grow­ing in­to a stand­alone com­pa­ny with multi­bil­lion mar­ket cap that can file for an IPO on the Hong Kong stock ex­change in a few years’ time.

Hua Mu

“We’ve been fol­low­ing in on the land­scape of ADC close­ly,” Over­land CMO Hua Mu said. “We know it’s an evolv­ing tech­nol­o­gy par­tic­u­lar­ly over the re­cent 2 years.”

But the over­whelm­ing ma­jor­i­ty of pro­grams are fo­cused on sol­id tu­mors, added Ed Zhang, the COO and CBO. You can find 10 or 12 dif­fer­ent AD­Cs tar­get­ed at HER2, but lon­ca and oth­er drugs from AD­CT (name­ly AD­CT-602, AD­CT-601 and AD­CT-901) would be the first com­pounds tagged with a pyrroloben­zo­di­azepine-based pay­load aimed at hema­to­log­i­cal in­di­ca­tions.

In the lead in­di­ca­tion of third-line re­lapsed/re­frac­to­ry dif­fuse large B cell lym­phoma, lon­ca spurred an over­all re­sponse rate of 48.3%. Giv­en that the 5-year sur­vival for DL­B­CL in Chi­na is 38% com­pared to 68% in the US and Eu­rope, Mu added, the drug would fill a huge gap.

While AD­CT is sup­ply­ing the ini­tial tri­al ma­te­r­i­al so that they can move as fast as pos­si­ble, there are tech trans­fer plans to even­tu­al­ly en­able man­u­fac­tur­ing in Chi­na — both for do­mes­tic use and be­yond.

“It’s more like a step­wise or two-step ap­proach,” Mu said.

From Lau­sanne, Switzer­land, Mar­tin not­ed he’s been com­mu­ni­cat­ing with Boston-based Zhang, Seat­tle-based Mu and the team in Chi­na via “hun­dreds of Zoom calls and Teams calls” as well as pho­tos.

It helped that he’s met the founders as well as the broad­er Hill­house team, he said. In fact, they were so keen not to lose time that AD­CT start­ed work­ing with Over­land be­fore for­mal­ly putting the JV to­geth­er.

“I think you learn to trust peo­ple by see­ing whether they do what they say. I think that’s a two-way street,” he said. “I must say I’ve been ex­treme­ly im­pressed by the Over­land team, not just the lead­er­ship team but the 30 peo­ple that they have work­ing with them. They’ve been very re­spon­sive, they’ve got on well with our — well, we have quite de­mand­ing clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment and CMC teams, they’ve got on well and been re­spon­sive and they’ve moved for­ward, ef­fec­tive­ly done what they say they would do.”

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