A flurry of deal-making hasn’t let up as 2025 comes to a close, with Roche subsidiary Genentech getting in on the action and crafting a multi-year cancer collaboration with Caris Life Sciences.
Genentech is teaming up with AI-focused Caris’ therapeutic research arm—dubbed Caris Discovery—in an effort to discover new oncology targets in solid tumor tissue, according to a Dec. 16 release.
Under the terms of the deal, Caris could collect $25 million in upfront and near-term payments, with Genentech also offering up to $1.1 billion in possible R&D, commercial and sales milestones, plus potential royalties.
In exchange, “techbio” company Caris will work to identify and validate new cancer targets, with the pair’s ultimate goal to develop a first-in-class precision medicine. The Texas-based company touts an AI-enabled multimodal database and tissue-based discovery engine used to create diagnostics for early detection, monitoring, therapy selection and drug development.
The cancer testing company also gleans knowledge from its repository of almost 500,000 solid tumor samples, plus matched molecular and clinical data, to offer target discovery capabilities to partners, such as Merck KGaA and Moderna.
The deal follows in the boot steps of numerous other biopharmas inking deals, with Sanofi teaming up with two separate biotechs and Pfizer pairing up with Adaptive Biotechnologies just yesterday.
Seattle’s Adaptive likely sighed with relief upon the deal signing, given that Genentech cut ties with the company this summer over a cancer cell therapy pact that could have reached a value of $2 billion. The termination continued the Roche unit’s summer of downsizing and cost-cutting, which included several layoff rounds and walking away from an oncology R&D pact with Bicycle Therapeutics.
“Roche and Genentech are driven by a profound vision—a future where cancer can be cured,” Roche’s head of corporate business development, Boris Zaïtra, said in the Dec.15 release about the new Caris collab.
“We have successfully led many fundamental scientific advances in oncology,” Zaïtra continued. “As we continue to bring forth transformative medicines, collaborations with partners such as Caris allow us to pursue future innovation for patients with unmet needs.”