The deal gets NextCure the rights to Simcere’s novel ADC for solid tumors outside of China.
NextCure is joining the China biopharma gold rush, partnering with Simcere Pharmaceutical Group on development of a novel antibody-drug conjugate for treating solid tumors.
Through the deal announced Monday, the Maryland-based company gets ex-China rights to SIM0505, an ADC developed by Simcere that targets CDH6 combined with a topoisomerase 1 inhibitor. NextCure will pay Simcere an undisclosed upfront fee, plus development, regulatory and sales milestones for sales outside of China, adding up to as much as $745 million.
“[Simcere’s] proprietary payload is a potent cytotoxin with a potentially improved safety and efficacy profile compared to other topoisomerase inhibitors,” Michael Richman, NextCure’s president and CEO, said in the statement announcing the deal.
NextCure’s stock was worth about 70 cents apiece before trading began Monday and fell to 50 cents by Monday afternoon, a 26% drop.
The deal also gives NextCure the rights to linker and topoisomerase payload technology developed by Simcere. NextCure will use that tech to develop another ADC on an unannounced preclinical target.
Simcere already has SIM0505 in Phase I dose escalation trials in China. NextCure will take the developmental reins in the U.S. and begin its own Phase I trial in the third quarter of 2025.
Adding SIM0505 to its pipeline brings NextCure’s total offerings to two, the other molecule being LNCB74, another ADC for solid tumors. That therapy is being developed together with LigaChem. The antibody in that ADC had at one time been in development on its own, but NextCure shifted its work to an ADC formulation in late 2023. LNCB74 is currently in a Phase I dose escalation trial.
The SIM0505 deal is part of a massive recent trend in biopharma of grabbing assets from Chinese biotechs. Obesity drugs have gotten the lion’s share of attention recently, but ADCs have had just as much activity. GSK alone in the last two years has gotten two separate ADCs from DualityBio and Hansoh Pharma for gastrointestinal and lung cancers as well as sarcomas, spending close to $3 billion for the two molecules. Gilead spent $415 million in biobucks to shore up its ADC pipeline in December 2024 with a deal to use Tubulis’ conjugation technology on “ultra-stable ADCs.” Roche dropped $1 billion in January on a Phase I ADC from Innovent in small cell lung cancers.
