Can two Chi­nese biotechs vault a home­grown PD-L1 agent to fron­trun­ner sta­tus in the crowd­ed glob­al check­point race?

Har­bour Bio­Med thinks the an­swer is yes, and it’s will­ing to spend a to­tal of $350 mil­lion to make that a re­al­i­ty.

Pay­ing an un­spec­i­fied up­front to Cheng­du-based Kelun Biotech — with whom it al­ready has an ear­ly-stage col­lab­o­ra­tion — Har­bour grabs ex­clu­sive rights to de­vel­op, man­u­fac­tur­ing and com­mer­cial­ize A167 out­side of greater Chi­na. Har­bour is head­quar­tered in Shang­hai with a Boston out­post.

In ad­di­tion to shar­ing da­ta from the Phase I and II tri­als it’s been con­duct­ing in Chi­na among pa­tients with lym­phoma and sol­id tu­mors, Kelun will al­so work with Har­bour to ex­plore any po­ten­tial com­bi­na­tion ther­a­pies — a hot strat­e­gy with check­point in­hibitors. And all that will ide­al­ly form the ba­sis of the de­vel­op­ment, reg­u­la­to­ry and com­mer­cial mile­stones.

Jing­song Wang

“We plan to con­duct A167-based com­bi­na­tion tri­als glob­al­ly by our­selves, in­clud­ing with in­no­v­a­tive com­pounds we are de­vel­op­ing, or in col­lab­o­ra­tion with our part­ners, to find bet­ter ther­a­peu­tic op­tions against a wide range of tu­mor types,” said CEO Jing­song Wang, a Sanofi R&D vet, in a state­ment.

A167 was one of 22 PD-1/L1 check­points da­ta an­a­lyt­ics firm Pharm­Cube count­ed in its re­cent tal­ly of Chi­nese biotech ef­forts in the field. And that fits in­to a glob­al ex­plo­sion of check­point stud­ies, which the Can­cer Re­search In­sti­tute es­ti­mat­ed at 1,502 clin­i­cal tri­als (1,105 of those com­bos) in­volv­ing 164 PD-1/L1 agents last De­cem­ber.

CRI warned that the gold rush on I/O was lead­ing com­pa­nies to jump in­to com­bo stud­ies with­out much sci­en­tif­ic back­ing. And the on­rush of new PD-1/L1s in the clin­ic could have big im­pli­ca­tions for mar­ket lead­ers Mer­ck and Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb, which both en­joy block­buster in­come from their check­points.

This marks the sec­ond li­cens­ing pact for Har­bour this month, hav­ing just ob­tained Chi­na rights to a breast can­cer drug tar­get­ing HER2 and CD3 from In­dia’s Glen­mark Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals days ago.

The nonprofit Bioethics International has come out with their latest scorecard on data transparency among the big biopharmas in the industry — flagging a few standouts while spotlighting some laggards who are continuing to underperform.

Now in its third year, the nonprofit created a new set of standards with Yale School of Medicine and Stanford Law School to evaluate the track record on trial registration, results reporting, publication and data-sharing practice.

Durect $DRRX got a badly needed shot in the arm Monday morning as Gilead’s busy BD team lined up access to its extended-release platform tech for HIV and hepatitis B.

Gilead, a leader in the HIV sector, is paying a modest $25 million in cash for the right to jump on the platform at Durect, which has been using its technology to come up with an extended-release version of bupivacaine. The FDA rejected that in 2014, but Durect has been working on a comeback.

Intec Pharma’s $NTEC lead drug slammed into a brick wall Monday morning. The small-cap Israeli biotech reported that its lead program — coming off a platform designed to produce a safer, more effective oral drug for Parkinson’s — failed the Phase III at the primary endpoint.

Researchers at Intec, which has already seen its share price collapse over the past few months, says that its Accordion Pill-Carbidopa/Levodopa failed to prove superior to Sinemet in reducing daily ‘off’ time.