Genome & Company, a Korean new drug developer, said on Monday that it signed a $426 million deal with Debiopharm, a Switzerland-based pharmaceutical company, to license out GENA-111, an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC). 

The deal includes an upfront payment of $5 million, milestone payments, and royalties based on net sales.

“We will transfer exclusive worldwide rights to develop and commercialize a GENA-111-based ADC, which combines our novel CD239-based antibody, GENA-111, with Debiopharm's ADC platform technology, Multilink™,” Genome&Company said in a public filing. 

GENA-111 targets CD239, a novel target discovered through Genome & Company's drug discovery platform Gnocle. Preclinical studies have shown that GENA-111 has high cancer cell expression relative to normal cells in various cancers, the company said.

The two companies have been jointly working on GENA-111, using Genome & Company’s antibodies and Debiopharm’s payload technology and linker-drug platform.