Ipsen and Marengo Expand Collaboration to Explore New Frontiers in Tumor Immunotherapy

Recently, international pharmaceutical company Ipsen announced that it will further expand its existing collaboration with Marengo Therapeutics, a start-up company in the field of tumor immunotherapy. According to the agreement reached by both parties, Ipsen and Marengo will leverage Marengo's TriSTAR platform to add two new oncology assets to their early-stage development collaboration.

The total amount of the new collaboration is up to $1.2 billion, which includes an upfront payment, as well as milestone payments based on the progress of the collaboration and tiered royalties on sales of the licensed rights. The roots of the collaboration can be traced back to August 2022, when Ipsen acquired the development rights of Marengo's two pre-clinical oncology candidates for over $1.6 billion.

Marengo's proprietary innovative technology platform TriSTAR is capable of precise targeting of the variable Vβ region of T cell receptors, thereby enabling precise activation and directed modulation of specific T cell subsets. This multi-specific antibody fusion technology is expected to overcome the limitations of traditional T cell therapies in terms of poor T cell quality and exhaustion, thereby more broadly activating T cell immune responses, especially for "cold" tumors that are less responsive to traditional treatment approaches.

David Jenkins, Senior Vice President of Research and External Innovation at Ipsen, expressed his genuine pleasure at deepening cooperation with the Marengo team and looked forward to jointly driving the development of innovative cancer treatments with them. Zhu Chen, CEO of Marengo, also expressed his keen expectation of working with Ipsen's oncology team to leverage the TriSTAR platform to tackle the challenges that traditional immunotherapy cannot overcome, bringing new hope to more cancer patients.

We have every reason to believe that, with the combined strengths of both parties in research and resource integration, new cancer immunotherapy solutions will continue to emerge, bringing new hope to patients. We look forward to seeing more exciting developments in this field in the future.