Seagen interim CEO Roger Dansey and Daiichi Sankyo CEO Sunao Manabe

Paving the way for Mer­ck­'s buy­out, Seagen los­es ar­bi­tra­tion dis­pute with Dai­ichi Sankyo over ADC tech

As Seagen awaits a fi­nal buy­out of­fer from Mer­ck that could be in the ter­ri­to­ry of $40 bil­lion, Seagen re­vealed Fri­day af­ter­noon that it lost an ar­bi­tra­tion dis­pute with Dai­ichi Sankyo re­lat­ing to the com­pa­nies’ 2008 col­lab­o­ra­tion around the use of an­ti­body-drug con­ju­gate (ADC) tech­nol­o­gy.

But that loss like­ly won’t mat­ter much when it comes to Mer­ck’s deal.

Af­ter break­ing off its pact with Dai­ichi in mid-2015, the two com­pa­nies bat­tled over “link­er” tech — a chem­i­cal bridge be­tween an ADC’s an­ti­body com­po­nent and the cy­to­tox­ic pay­load — that Seagen claims Dai­ichi would im­prove up­on and im­ple­ment in its cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of AD­Cs.

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