Roche CEO Thomas Schinecker said during the company’s Q3 call that it is “not done” with deals—a promise he delivered on with Tuesday’s solid tumor pact with AI-focused Caris Life Sciences.
Roche is “not done” with deals, CEO Thomas Schinecker said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call in October. The pharma bore that out on Tuesday as its subsidiary Genentech partnered with AI-focused Caris Life Sciences to advance novel therapies for solid tumors.
Under the terms of the agreement, Genentech will put down $25 million upfront and promise up to $1.1 billion in research, development, commercial and net sales milestones. Caris will also be eligible to receive tiered royalties on net sales if any of the alliance’s assets reach the market. The partners did not disclose how many programs they expect to work on or what indications they plan to prioritize.
For its investment, Roche will gain access to Caris’ proprietary AI-driven platform, which according to the Tuesday release, consists of almost 500,000 solid tumor samples, as well as matched molecular and clinical data.
This degree of information enables “sophisticated and flexible target discovery capabilities,” Caris claimed, in turn feeding into an “integrated” workflow that combines wet-lab experiments and bioinformatics.
The Caris partnership will allow Roche to “pursue future innovation for patients with unmet needs,” Boris Zaitra, head of the pharma’s Corporate Business Development, said in a statement.
2025 has been a prolific year for Roche’s business development team. In September, the company acquired 89bio for $3.5 billion, a deal anchored by the FGF21 analog pegozafermin, being tested for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis. Then, last month, Roche paid $55 million for another AI deal, this time with Manifold Bio, with the goal of developing molecular shuttles that can cross the blood-brain barrier. The pharma also pledged up to $2 billion in milestones, plus royalties.
Other big-ticket deals Roche has signed this year include its more than $2 billion molecular glue bet with Orionis Biosciences in May and its aging alliance with Gero in July, potentially worth more than $1 billion.
