Spin-out sold
This is a handsome return for the investors who have put £40 million into the company, with the most recent round of £17 million completing in December 2005. The largest shareholder, the Australian antibody company Peptech Ltd, realised £73.1 million for its £16 million investment, while retaining rights to the domain antibody technology that GSK put such a high value on.
Privately-held Domantis is the smaller sib of Cambridge Antibody Technology Group plc, which was acquired by AstraZeneca plc for £702 million earlier this year. Both companies are based on discoveries by Greg Winter and Ian Tomlinson at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. While CAT was built around monoclonal antibodies, Domantis is based around their smaller counterparts, domain antibodies (dAbs).
When CAT was formed in 1996, the Domantis technology was specifically excluded because at the time it was thought that dAbs were too small to manipulate.
As the smallest functional units of antibodies, dAbs weigh in at 90 per cent less than monoclonals and have the ability to hit a wider range of targets. The extra flexibility this provides has enabled Domantis to create dual-targeting domain antibodies that can bind two different tumour antigens. Healthy cells that express only one, or neither, of the antigens are not affected.
Domantis has experimented in using dual-targeting dAbs to deliver a variety of chemotherapeutics. The company has three proprietary programmes in multiple myeloma, small cell lung cancer and colorectal cancer, but as yet all are preclinical.
The size of the deal reflects both pharma’s hunger for products to bolster anaemic pipelines and the fact that antibodies have now entered the mainstream. GSK started talks for a licence to the domain antibody technology in August and decided to make a full bid when Domantis received an unsolicited offer from a third party while negotiations were in progress.
Domantis will become part of GSK’s Biopharmaceuticals Centre of Excellence for Drug Discovery while continuing to operate from its existing laboratories in Cambridge.
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