AstraZeneca will carry out potentially more than $11 billion worth of collaborations in China that include partnerships with three Chinese-based companies to develop drugs and vaccines, as well as an R&D center in Beijing that will be its sixth worldwide, the pharma giant and its partners said.
The largest of the collaborations is a potentially more than $4.68 billion partnership with Shanghai-based Harbour BioMed to discover and develop next-generation multi-specific antibodies for immunology, oncology, “and beyond.”
As part of the collaboration, AstraZeneca is making a $105 million equity investment in Harbour, toward a 9.15% stake in the Chinese biopharma. The strategic collaboration gives AstraZeneca an option to license for clinical development unspecified “multiple” programs using Harbour’s Harbour Mice® fully human antibody technology platform in unspecified “multiple” therapeutic areas. These include two preclinical immunology programs, though AstraZeneca will nominate further targets for which Harbour will work to discover next-generation multi-specific antibodies.
AstraZeneca also agreed to pay Harbour $175 million in upfront and near-term milestone payments as well as option exercise fees, plus up to $4.4 billion tied to achieving additional development and commercial milestones, along with tiered royalties on future net sales. AstraZeneca and Harbour have options to include additional programs into the collaboration over the next five years, as well as to extend their agreement for an additional five years.
To support the collaboration and earlier initiatives between the companies, Harbour said it will establish an innovation center in Beijing, to be co-located with AstraZeneca’s planned $2.5 billion R&D hub.
AstraZeneca’s planned Global Strategic R&D Center will be its second R&D hub in China; the first is in Shanghai. The Beijing hub is intended to advance early-stage research and clinical development and will feature a new AI and data science laboratory. The new R&D center will be located within the Beijing International Pharmaceutical Innovation Park (BioPark), near leading biotechs, research hospitals, and the National Medical Products Administration, China’s drug regulatory agency.
“This $2.5 billion investment reflects our belief in the world-class life sciences ecosystem in Beijing, the extensive opportunities that exist for collaboration and access to talent, and our continued commitment to China,” AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said in a statement.
The new hub and planned collaborations are expected to nearly triple the size of AstraZeneca’s Beijing-based workforce, from about 600 now to a projected 1,700.
Earlier partnerships
The latest Harbour collaboration follows earlier partnerships announced by the company and a subsidiary with AstraZeneca in recent years.
Last year, AstraZeneca agreed to license preclinical monoclonal antibodies from Harbour subsidiary Nona Biosciences toward creating targeted therapies in oncology. In return, AstraZeneca agreed to pay Nona $19 million upfront, up to $10 million in near-term milestone payments, and up to $575 million tied to achieving specified development, regulatory, and commercial milestones, plus tiered royalty payments on net sales. Nona would receive additional money if AstraZeneca exercises options to develop additional programs.
• A strategic partnership of unknown value with Beijing Cancer Hospital.
AstraZeneca announced the initiatives five months after disclosing last October that Leon Wang, the president of its Chinese division as well as executive vice president of its international business, had been detained as part of an investigation by authorities. Bloomberg News has since reported that authorities were investigating Wang among some of the company’s current and former employees concerning alleged violations of law involving drug imports, data privacy, and insurance reimbursement.
Wang’s international duties are now handled by Iskra Reic, who also continues as AstraZeneca’s senior vice president for vaccines and immune therapies.
Macrocyclic peptides
Syneron will partner with AstraZeneca to develop potentially first-in-class macrocyclic peptides for the treatment of chronic diseases. Syneron has granted AstraZeneca access to its Synova™ platform, a high-throughput macrocyclic peptide drug R&D platform designed to advance research “exploring possible future treatments of chronic diseases, including rare, autoimmune, and metabolic disease,” according to Syneron.
AstraZeneca agreed to pay Syneron $75 million in upfront and potential near-term milestone payments, as well as up to $3.4 billion in additional development and commercial milestones. In addition, tiered royalties will be paid based on global sales. Syneron Bio also said it plans to expand its Beijing R&D center.
BioKangtai will partner with AstraZeneca to develop, manufacture, and commercialize new vaccines for respiratory and other infectious diseases for patients in and outside China, at what will be AstraZeneca’s first and only vaccine manufacturing facility in the country.
“The company and AstraZeneca plan to jointly establish a joint venture in the Economic Development Zone with an estimated registered capital of RMB 345 million [about $50 million] to develop global innovative vaccines (expected to include AstraZeneca’s respiratory An investigational combination vaccine against RSV and hMPV, also known as IVX-A12) and development, registration, localized production, and commercialization of other innovative products in China,” according to a Google Translate translation of the BioKangtai-AstraZeneca agreement, posted in Chinese on BioKangtai’s website.
“The total investment in this project is estimated to be approximately US$400 million (approximately RMB 2.76 billion). The actual investment amount will be determined by the joint venture company based on the project progress,” the agreement added. “The project is scheduled to be put into use before December 31, 2030, and the final time of commissioning will be subject to the actual progress of the project.”
The BioKangtai joint venture follows from a relationship between the companies highlighted when BioKangtai began distributing AsraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine after securing rights to manufacture and sell it in mainland China, Pakistan, and Indonesia, where it began by shipping an initial more than four million doses in November 2021.
AstraZeneca said the partnership with Beijing Cancer Hospital will focus on translational research, data science, and clinical development.
Beijing Cancer Hospital is a 790-bed facility that, according to an English text posted on its website, “has been engaged in the diagnosis and treatment of various tumors, such as breast cancer, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, liver cancer, gastric cancer, esophageal carcinoma, malignant lymphoma, gynecological cancer, tumor of head and neck, tumor of urological system, bone tumor, and melanoma.”