Tagworks lands $65M for its take on Nobel-winning click chemistry in bid to expand ADC, radiopharma potential

A Dutch-American biotech is out with $65 million in Series A funding to get into the clinic with what it calls an expanded scope of the popular antibody-drug conjugates class after a decade of legwork iterating on the original click chemistry findings that led to last year’s Nobel Prize.

Tagworks Pharmaceuticals, founded within the corporate labs of Philips Healthcare and spun out in 2011, has spent the past 10-plus years working with academics to get to a point where it can create so-called click-to-release reactions. Its efforts build on the work out of Joseph Fox’s lab at the University of Delaware and that of Carolyn Bertozzi, who is one of three professors to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year.

“Those were first-generation designs, basically, to use organic chemistry in a complex environment, but since then, the reactions have evolved,” Tagworks CEO and co-founder Marc Robillard told Endpoints News, referring to the discoveries that led to last year’s Nobel for Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless, whom Tagworks congratulated in a press release at the time.

Tagworks’ goal is to activate antibody-drug conjugates on target. It’s also looking for biopharma partners on its radiopharma work, where it looks to tamp down the off-target effects of the drugs. That was part of the attraction for the venture arm of Novartis, which makes the radiotherapies Pluvicto and Lutathera.

For a while, Tagworks was bootstrapped and funded by Dutch firms like Meneldor and Oost NL as well as high net-worth private investors. Grant funding and academic partnerships also came along the way, as did a companion diagnostics collaboration with a large unnamed pharma in 2012.

Now, Tagworks is eyeing a move into the clinic. Lead candidate TGW101, a TAG72-targeted ADC, is in IND-enabling studies. They look to broaden the potential of the ADC class, which combines an antibody’s selectivity and a payload’s cytotoxic potency. The class has picked up steam with a handful of FDA approvals in recent years, as well as interest of pharma companies, including Pfizer’s $43 billion megadeal for Seagen and biopharma collaborations left and right.

“We’re not competing with current ADCs,” Robillard said. “We’re expanding the scope to a whole new target scope.”

The class, he explained, has historically been limited mainly to cancer receptors that are good at internalizing the ADC inside the cell.

“In many solid tumors, there’s a lack of well-behaved, cleanly over-expressed, rapidly internalizing, good metabolizing receptors,” he added.

Jay Feingold

Instead, Tagworks aims to release the payload outside the cell using its click-to-release tech. By controlling the payload’s release in the tumor microenvironment, the biotech hopes to destroy heterogenous tumors since not all cells express the desired target.

The work has attracted some ADC veterans, including chair Chris Martin (the former CEO of ADC Therapeutics) and Jay Feingold, who’s taking up the post of chief medical officer after running the same duties at ADC Therapeutics and Pyxis Oncology, the biotech carrying forward Pfizer’s ADC program.

The 20-person biotech has operations in the Netherlands and the US. Ysios Capital and Gilde Healthcare led the Series A, disclosed Thursday. In addition to Novartis Venture Fund, other capital providers include New Enterprise Associates and Lightstone Ventures.

Tagworks’ ADC pipeline includes two additional, undisclosed targets, and the company said it sees a breadth of applications for its in vivo click-conjugation and click-to-release tech with small molecules, peptides, antibodies and fragments.

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