Adimab, Arsanis, and Platform Cloning -- a New Biotech Model?

Adimab, the yeast-based antibody discovery company that has amassed a strong portfolio of partnerships and skyrocketed to a north-of-$500m valuation, has always said it had no plans to do its own development work. If only the company could clone itself, perhaps it could venture down the development path without getting distracted from its discovery platform opportunity -- and the high multiples that can be extracted from a company that doesn't need a ton of development financing.

Enter the clone, Arsanis.

Arsanis is a biotech essentially seeded with Adimab's technology platform that will apply this yeast-based antibody discovery engine to developing drugs against infectious disease targets. The company will run research out of Vienna, Austria and plans to hire 20-25 employees in the next few months, according to founder and chief scientist Eszter Nagy, MD, PhD.

Adimab doesn't own Arsanis (though it stands to make money if Arsanis succeeds), but Adimab's investors do. The new company has raised about $10 million from SV Life Sciences, Orbimed, and Polaris, three Adimab backers. We've spoken to all those firms, to Adimab, and to Arsanis' Nagy, who hails most recently from Intercell. We'll have more on Adimab's strategy, the new company and the advantages of the model for its venture backers in a forthcoming issue of START-UP.

For now suffice it to say that Adimab has enabled a newco with its technology, helped put together a familiar syndicate to back it, and those investors can now put more money to work behind that Adimab platform. If Arsanis is successful we bet you'll see additional Adimab clones in other therapeutic spaces where Adimab's brand of faster/cheaper/better antibody discovery can yield "an unfair advantage," as one of Adimab/Arsanis' venture backers puts it.

How the company defines success remains to be seen. The $10 million should see the company all the way through to "compelling preclinical proof of concept" for a couple of antibody programs against unmet needs in infectious diseases, the players tell us, all within the next two years.

Nobody involved with Arsanis has suggested this strategy is new to biotech, but we haven't seen it work exactly like this before -- perhaps the closest comparator are the twin antibody firms Medarex and Genmab.

Meanwhile, Tillman Gerngross and Errik Anderson, Adimab's CEO and COO (founders and board members at Arsanis), have with their team transformed Adimab from a C-corp to an LLC, something we reported in December, and plan to expand the company's slate of discovery collaborations. The LLC transformation -- no easy feat according to all involved -- allows the biotech to return money from forthcoming collaborations to shareholders in a tax-efficient way.

It also dispels the notion, Gerngross says, that Adimab is for sale. "We're completely uninterested in short-term liquidity. We don't want what has happened in the past, where the company gets bought and then has a limited impact," he says. "We have a greater ambition."