A play in the hot antibody-drug conjugate space which has seen big ticket deals?(Also see "AbbVie Spends $10bn On ImmunoGen To Improve Chances In ADC Space" - Scrip, 30 November, 2023.)(Also see "BMS Bets $8.4bn On Biokin’s Bispecific ADC" - Scrip, 12 December, 2023.)(Also see "Daiichi In Massive $22bn Global Deal With Merck & Co For Three ADCs" - Scrip, 20 October, 2023.)

Dr Cyril Konto: First, ADC is a small name for a big field. It's really the tree hiding the forest.

The field of ADCs has evolved to multiple ramifications. There are of course those ADCs like we used to know them five years ago, but we have immunostimulating antibody-drug conjugates, the drug in that case is not necessarily a cytotoxic payload, it's an immunostimulating payload. We’re spot on, we're already developing one.

There's also dual payload ADCs where you attach two different cytotoxic to an ADC and you have also bispecific antibody drug conjugate or multispecific antibody drug conjugates, which is even more interesting in our case. So yes, it's an important field and yes, IGI will deliver on this - I'd say at minimal an immunostimulating ADC but in a larger proportion it could eventually be a multi specific drug conjugate.

We’re accessing our options. We do not have the payload and the linker technology IP. So that's why we are assessing what will be the best companies to partner with and if there’s a company open to conjugate a cytotoxic payload with their linker on our BEAT platform, we are happy to entertain that discussion. We are already doing it proactively. We are also assessing proposals that we receive in parallel. So, we are doing our own diligence besides the immunostimulating ADC already ongoing.

Pharma has some ‘fashion cycles’, so I’ve instructed my team to make sure that if we invest in ADCs, we do not come after the game is over. The timeline component of this is important and this will happen through partnerships. We need to get the right technologies in- house and alliances and partnerships are in our DNA at IGI.

While IGI isn't likely to go to the extent of overarching deals like the recent Merck KGaA-Caris Life Sciences partnership to discover novel cancer targets and accelerate first-in-class antibody drug conjugate development, a Chinese partner that has payload and linker technology could potentially be among the more feasible options for an alliance.(Also see "Chinese ADC Developers Unveil More Target Combos In Bispecific Drive" - Scrip, 14 March, 2024.)(Also see "Late To The Antibody-Drug Conjugate Party, But Will 2024 Be A Turning Point For India?" - Scrip, 4 January, 2024.)(Also see "Merck KGaA Looks To Build Cancer ADCs With Caris’s AI Technology" - Scrip, 4 April, 2024.)

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