Saturday, March 31, 2018
Ligand Pharmaceuticals Incorporated announces it has entered into an agreement with venBio Partners, a venture capital group focused on building and funding portfolio companies with potential first- and best-in-class therapeutic product applications, which permits venBio’s portfolio companies to enter into a pre-agreed worldwide OmniAb platform license agreement. Under any platform license agreement, venBio’s portfolio companies will be able to use the full OmniAb platform including OmniRat®, OmniMouse®, OmniFlic® and OmniChicken™ to discover fully human mono- and bispecific antibodies. Ligand is eligible to receive access payments, development and regulatory milestone payments, and tiered royalties for each product incorporating an OmniAb antibody. venBio’s future portfolio companies will be responsible for all costs related to the programs.
“This deal represents an ‘OmniAb first’ in terms of enabling a venture investor to incubate a series of new companies with common OmniAb licensing terms, enabling their portfolio companies to focus on drug development and value creation from the start,” said John Higgins, Chief Executive Officer of Ligand. “The OmniAb business continues to expand, driven by industry demand for our leading antibody-discovery technology with multiple species and broad freedom-to-operate.”