Roche’s Genentech is betting on the Flagship Pioneering–founded company’s discovery platform called DECODE to find new targets for an undisclosed autoimmune disorder.
Roche’s Genentech is beefing up its immunology pipeline, entering into a partnership with Repertoire Immune Medicines in a deal worth $35 million upfront.
The agreement, announced Wednesday, will see Genentech work with Repertoire on discovering and developing T cell–targeting medicines for an undisclosed autoimmune disorder. Repertoire is set to receive an additional $730 million in milestone payments, as well as tiered royalties.
Repertoire, a Cambridge, Mass.–based biotech, brings to the deal its DECODE platform, which the company says can “uniquely map the immune synapse,” the region that forms between a T cell and an antigen-presenting cell.
“The enormous breadth of DECODE’s therapeutic target discovery potential is well beyond what we could realize on our own,” said Repertoire’s CEO and chairman Torben Straight Nissen, also an executive partner at Flagship Pioneering, in a statement announcing the deal.
Repertoire launched in 2020 with assets from two previous Flagship companies, Cogen Immune Medicines and Torque Therapeutics. Almost immediately after, Repertoire faced rough seas, stopping two Phase I trials for T cell therapies in HPV-positive tumors after data showed they had limited effect.
The deal comes nearly a year after another big biobucks deal for Repertoire, where the biotech got $65 million up front from Bristol Myers Squibb and up to $1.8 billion total in potential milestones to develop three vaccines for unnamed autoimmune diseases.
Genentech for its part has not been shy in dealmaking lately. The Roche subsidiary tossed the struggling Sangamo Therapeutics a lifeline in August 2024 in a deal worth up to $1.9 billion to develop treatments for neurodegenerative diseases. That followed a September 2023 deal with Orionis worth up to $2 billion for molecular glue degraders in cancer and neurodegeneration, which came the same week as a pact with PeptiDream for up to $1 billion for radiopharmaceuticals, a new avenue for Genentech.
