F-star, Takeda collaborate to develop new generation immunotherapies

China's pharmaceutical conglomerate Sino Biopharmaceutical Limited, or Sino Biopharm, announced on Wednesday that its wholly-owned subsidiary F-star Therapeutics Limited in Cambridge, UK has reached a strategic cooperation and entered into a licensing agreement with Takeda, a well-known Japanese pharmaceutical company.

The collaboration will leverage F-star's proprietary medicine development platforms to research and develop next-generation multi-specific immunotherapies for patients with cancer.

F-star will receive an undisclosed upfront payment and research funding during the collaboration and is entitled to potential development and commercialization milestone payments of up to $1 billion, plus potential annual net sales of any commercial products licensed amount of patent royalties.

The cooperation and licensing agreement, the third licensing agreement signed between F-star and Takeda within one year, further demonstrates the great potential of F-star's multi-antibody platform and is another achievement of China's biopharmaceutical internationalization innovation model, Sino Biopharm said.

In March of this year, Sino Biopharmaceutical successfully acquired F-star, which is an internationally leading biotechnology company in the research and development of dual antibody platforms. 

liuzhihua@chinadaily.com.cn