OnCo
ideasIdea

An open engineering platform for academic ADCs and bispecifics

Academic labs find new tumour targets but cannot turn an antibody into an antibody-drug conjugate or a bispecific without licensed linker and payload technology. A shared platform would provide that at no cost for first trials.

A publicly-funded platform holding licences (or developing its own patent-free versions) for linker-payload chemistries, site-specific conjugation, bispecific formats and CAR constructs, offered royalty-free to academic teams for research and first-in-human studies, with commercial terms triggered only on licensing to a company. Paired with GMP manufacturing at translational institutes, this lets academic centres test conjugates against novel or rare-cancer antigens that no company will prioritise. The Structural Genomics Consortium's open chemical probes and the IAVI/Neutralizing Antibody Center model for HIV antibodies are precedents for open engineering infrastructure.

Hypothesis
An open ADC and bispecific platform enables at least ten academic first-in-human trials of conjugates against novel or rare-cancer antigens within five years, compared with near zero today, and at least two are subsequently licensed.
Rationale
Modern ADC success is largely payload and linker engineering, which is patent-encumbered and inaccessible to academics; the antigens most likely to matter for rare cancers are found in academia. Open tool infrastructure has repeatedly seeded new fields (SGC probes, Addgene plasmids).
What would test it
Fund the platform for three years, count academic conjugate programmes reaching GMP manufacturing and first-in-human dosing, and compare with the prior five-year baseline.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
engineering
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
4
Bottlenecks it attacks

Connected

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