Calico will leverage 9MW3811’s anti-inflammatory mechanism to advance its mission of addressing aging-related diseases.
Alphabet’s aging-focused subsidiary Calico Life Sciences has entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with Mabwell Bioscience to advance the Shanghai biotech’s anti-IL-11 monoclonal antibodies for age-related diseases.
Under the terms of the collaboration, Calico will make an upfront payment of $25 million and commit up to $571 million in development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments, according to an automated translation of Thursday’s Chinese-language filing.
The star of Thursday’s partnership is Mabwell’s investigational antibody 9MW3811, which according to the biotech’s website targets and blocks the IL-11 cytokine, in turn disabling its downstream signaling pathway. As a result, 9MW3811’s mechanism of action suppresses the body’s inflammatory response.
Mabwell is currently studying 9MW3811 for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, with approvals to initiate trials in China, the U.S. and Australia. The FDA cleared the molecule’s Investigational New Drug application in this indication in June 2023.
For Calico, however, 9MW3811’s mechanism could present a novel pathway for addressing aging and age-related disorders. Calico will gain the exclusive right to develop, manufacture and commercialize the asset outside the Greater China region.
The California-based biotech was founded in September 2013 by Alphabet, the parent company of internet search giant Google. The aging-focused startup started making waves in the industry a year later, in September 2014, when it partnered with AbbVie to establish an R&D center in Illinois. Both parties at the time committed to an initial funding of $250 million each, with the potential to pitch in $500 million more.
The companies upped the agreement in June 2018, with each putting in $500 million toward the goal of developing treatments for age-related diseases. In January this year, however, this deep-pocketed alliance ran into a clinical hurdle when their drug candidate fosigotifator, an inhibitor of the eukaryotic initiation factor 2B, failed to significantly slow disease progression in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, according to topline findings from the HEALEY ALS platform trial.
According to its website, Calico looks at the underlying biology of aging to identify novel pharmaceutical targets—those “that are not currently being pursued by many others,” the company noted.
Elsewhere in the aging space, BioAge in January shelved its lead asset azelaprag after safety concerns over liver damage. The biotech was studying azelaprag as a treatment for obesity. Results from the Phase II STRIDES study in December 2024 showed that patients treated with the molecule had elevated levels of liver enzymes, leading the company to suspend the study.
