As 2025 closes out, a pair of autoimmune biotechs have eked out separate deals with Big Pharma before year-end, each with a sizable potential payout down the line.
Seattle’s Adaptive Biotechnologies, which currently has no approved drugs but does boast commercial products for diagnosis and disease monitoring, is linking up with Pfizer on two non-exclusive pacts leveraging the biotech’s bespoke T-cell receptor discovery engine and large-scale immune receptor antigen mapping data, according to a Dec. 15 release.
Also on Monday, Dren Bio of San Carlos, California, announced in a separate deal that it has expanded a strategic collaboration with Sanofi in a bid to discover and develop a potential next-generation B-cell depleting therapy for “various autoimmune diseases.”
The Pfizer deal will net Adaptive an undisclosed upfront payment and could reward the biotech with potential data, development, commercial and sales milestones amounting to some $890 million in the future, the company said.
For its part, Dren is receiving $100 million in cash upfront from Sanofi, with the potential to snare up to $1.7 billion more in biobucks.
Adopting Adaptive’s biotechnologies
The accord between Pfizer and Adaptive loops back to the biotech’s work identifying autoreactive or ‘offender’ T-cell receptors (TCRs) that could potentially trigger disease in patients with autoimmune conditions.
Pfizer will leverage Adaptive’s immune medicine platform to pinpoint disease-causing TCRs as potential therapeutic agents for rheumatoid arthritis, Adaptive noted in its release. The New York pharma will then tackle the development and commercialization of any therapies yielded from the team-up.
Adaptive, meanwhile, will apply its platform to Pfizer’s clinical samples to identify the subset of common TCRs that are “significantly enriched in RA patients,” the announcement continues.
Pfizer and Adaptive have also forged a licensing deal in which Pfizer takes on “certain Adaptive TCR-antigen data” that it will use to develop and train its AI and machine learning tools for research and drug discovery across “multiple disease areas,” Adaptive said.
Adaptive did not disclose the financial terms of this second partnership but clarified that it is slated to receive both an upfront payment and “additional future potential annual licensing fees” from the TCR-antigen data deal.
“Using our AI-enabled immune medicine platform, Adaptive has amassed a treasure trove of immune receptor data along with an enhanced understanding of T-cell biology,” Chad Robins, Adaptive’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “This deep and well-characterized immune system data has the potential to inform discoveries across immunology programs that may lead to next-generation therapeutics in RA.”
Dren levels up Sanofi bond
Over at Dren, the privately held biotech is growing a prior collaboration with Sanofi unveiled earlier this year. Under the added team-up, the partners will link on drug discovery and preclinical development using Dren’s proprietary targeted myeloid engager and phagocytosis platform—again in hopes of locating a promising B-cell-depleting asset for a range of potential autoimmune indications, Dren said in its release.
Once a candidate has been isolated, Sanofi will take over development, manufacturing, regulatory and commercialization work, according to the announcement. As part of the deal, Dren also has the option to enter into a U.S. profit-and-loss-sharing arrangement with the French Big Pharma.
Should Dren go that route, the biotech would co-fund 40% of ongoing global development costs in exchange for co-promotion rights in the U.S. and a 50/50 share of profits and losses stateside. Under that prospective arrangement, the biotech said it would also remain eligible for milestones and tiered royalties on potential net sales outside the U.S.
“Sanofi has been a valued partner in unlocking the full potential of deep B-cell depletion through the acquisition of DR-0201, and we’re thrilled to expand our collaboration by further leveraging the capabilities of our Targeted Myeloid Engager and Phagocytosis platform,” Dren’s COO and chief business officer, Amit Mehta, Ph.D., said in a statement.
Sanofi and Dren are deepening their connection some eight months after initially banding together. At the time, Sanofi said it would throw down $600 million upfront—with the promise of more than $1 billion in biobucks—to acquire Dren’s bispecific antibody candidate DR-0201, which the biotech has been evaluating in a phase 1 trial for B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
“Deep B-cell depletion is at the frontier of treating autoimmune diseases and using the myeloid cell engager DR-0201 has the potential to elevate the treatment effect for patients, in particular patients refractory to existing treatments,” Sanofi’s head of R&D, Houman Ashrafian, Ph.D., said in a release at the time.
Dren has also lassoed myeloid-engager-themed deals with the likes of Novartis and Pfizer.
The Pfizer deal, meanwhile, could serve as a balm for Adaptive after Roche’s Genentech unit ended a cell therapy pact with the biotech this summer that could have reached a value of $2 billion.
The deal—which was struck back in 2019 and revolved around Genentech’s hopes to develop personal cancer meds based on Adaptive’s TCR technology—will formally come to a close on Feb. 9, 2026, the companies confirmed in August.
The deal termination came right on the heels of Genentech's downsizing efforts in June and July. In a statement, a company representative told Fierce Biotech that the decision had nothing to do with any emerging safety concerns.