ETH spin-out Cytos in CHF150M Pfizer deal

Research, option and licensing deal

Cytos Biotechnology AG of Switzerland has signed a research, option and licence agreement for vaccines with Pfizer Inc, under which it will receive CHF 150 million (about €93 million) in upfront and potential milestone payments plus manufacturing technology transfer fees, research funding and royalties on net sales of products.

After completion of the research programmes and exercise of its options, Pfizer will acquire world-wide exclusive rights to commercialise certain vaccines, which are based on Cytos’s Immunodrug technology.

The vaccines will target diseases that are outside the scope of Cytos’s own programmes and the Swiss company retains rights to develop vaccines against different disease targets in the same human diseases as are covered by the Pfizer agreement.

Preclinical and clinical development, manufacturing and commercialisation of vaccines included in the agreement will be the responsibility of Pfizer.

“The vaccine market, including therapeutic vaccines, represents an increasingly attractive segment of the healthcare market. This collaboration with Pfizer further establishes Cytos Biotechnology’s Immunodrug as the vaccine [technology] of choice for top-tier pharmaceutical companies and complements our ongoing collaboration with Pfizer Animal Health,” said Mark Dyer, Executive Vice President Business Development of Cytos.

Cytos’s Immunodrug technology is a flexible method of inducing specific immune responses against disease-associated targets from a wide variety of sources, including the body’s own as well as foreign molecules. The company was spun out of ETH-Zürich in 1995 to commercialise the technology.