Gilead bets $66M upfront for Tentarix’s protein therapeutics in inflammation, cancer

Gilead will pony up $66 million in an upfront payment and equity investment to collaborate with Tentarix Biotherapeutics on biologics for inflammatory diseases and oncology, the companies said Tuesday morning.

San Diego-based Tentarix could receive up to another $240 million if Gilead elects to acquire three of the biotech’s subsidiaries that house the oncology and inflammatory disease programs included in the pact, the partners said. That figure would be split evenly across the three programs, which use the startup’s so-called Tentacles platform.

The collaborations are multi-year, the companies said, without specifying what event or milestones would trigger Gilead’s exclusive rights to buy the programs.

The Versant- and Samsara-bankrolled biotech has said little since its $50 million debut in the fall of 2021. It’s creating multi-functional protein therapeutics that it hopes will selectively hit immune cells in disease pathways without drumming up off-target immune cells that could lead to adverse events.

Staying true to its platform’s moniker, Tentarix hopes to engage more than two targets, with multiple approaches to specific cell groups associated with various diseases.

Tentarix president and CEO Paul Grayson told Endpoints News that the platform lets the biotech’s scientists “take what we used to call multifunctional antibodies and turn them into this multi-parametric equation where interacting with each of those different proteins on the surface of a cell turns into like a combination on a lock or a password.”

“If you have one character or one number wrong, it doesn’t work,” continued Grayson, who’s also a Versant venture partner, “which for us is great because that means it’s probably not the cell that we want to be interacting with.”

The biotech, which employs about 40 people across San Diego and Vancouver, has an internal pipeline of early-stage, preclinical assets centered around oncology, inflammation and autoimmunity. “We’ll be looking to figure out ways to fund internal programs as well,” he said.

Flavius Martin

“This early-stage collaboration with Tentarix will be highly synergistic to our ongoing efforts, building upon our growing strength in protein therapeutics, and may provide access to next-generation, multi-specific biologics,” said Flavius Martin, Gilead’s EVP of research, in a statement.

For Gilead, the tie-up marks its latest foray into external innovation on the inflammatory front. The biotech expanded its oncology research deal with Arcus Biosciences, which has run into clinical hurdles, to include inflammatory diseases in May. Gilead also beefed up its pipeline in both disease areas with its acquisition of XinThera for undisclosed terms in May.

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