Gilead and Tentarix in pact to find therapies for cancer, inflamation

Gilead Sciences and Tentarix Biotherapeutics announced that the companies established three multi-year collaborations leveraging Tentarix’s proprietary Tentacles platform to discover and develop multi-functional, conditional protein therapeutics for oncology and inflammatory diseases. Designed to enhance both therapeutic benefit and safety, these molecules have the potential to conditionally target immune cells related to disease pathways without activating other immune cells that may create adverse events. “At Gilead, a key area of our research strategy is addressing immune dysregulation in oncology and inflammatory diseases,” said Flavius Martin, M.D., Executive Vice President, Research, Gilead Sciences. “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.” Across the three collaborations, Tentarix will receive upfront payments and an equity investment from Gilead totaling $66M. In addition, Gilead has the option to acquire up to three select Tentarix subsidiaries containing the programs developed under the collaborations for $80M per subsidiary. Beginning in the first quarter of 2022, consistent with recent industry communications from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission SEC , Gilead no longer excludes acquired IPR&D expenses from its non-GAAP financial measures. We expect the transaction with Tentarix to reduce Gilead’s GAAP and non-GAAP 2023 EPS by approximately 3c – 4c.