By Randall Osborne

West Coast Editor

With a stockpiled supply of targets reaped through its genomics efforts, Eos Biotechnology Inc. signed a three-year deal with Aventis Pasteur to develop cancer vaccines.

Eos, of South San Francisco, already had an agreement with Medarex Inc. for human antibodies, and the Aventis pact represents "for us, a real boon in capturing value off a byproduct that we didn't have the depth to pursue on our own," said David Martin, president and CEO of Eos.

Lyon, France-based Aventis wants intracellular targets; Medarex, of Princeton, N.J., is interested in those on the cell surface.

"It's a very nice split," Martin told BioWorld Today. "We frequently don't know the nature of the protein molecule at the time we develop an interest and profile it - we don't know if it's on the surface or intracellular. Before, if targets were not on the surface, we didn't work on them anymore. So, we've been accruing target candidates for DNA vaccines for about a year."

Aventis, a subsidiary of Aventis SA, is providing an undisclosed up-front fee, along with funding of research and development, in exchange for an exclusive license to design vaccines based on targets discovered by Eos, which gets milestone payments and royalties on any products that come out of the agreement.

"They're pretty good royalties for an early target," Martin said. "Single digit, but we're pleased."

Eos will deliver a handful of targets - Martin would not specify how many - during the next few months. The focus will be on two areas, which he also declined to identify precisely.

"They're both cancer-related," he said. "We've committed to providing [Aventis] with a finite number of targets per year, but we don't know what the flow will be the next couple of years."

Eos, with programs in cancer, inflammation and angiogenesis, is focusing first on therapeutic antibodies.

"The way the Aventis agreement is structured, we'll provide them with targets that have been specificity-validated, and they will do validation of them as functional vaccines," Martin said. "That's a much earlier handoff than the handoff of a therapeutic antibody," which is why the latter is likely to consume more internal resources, he said.

Eos entered the Medarex agreement in February to use transgenic mice in developing antibody products to fight cancer. The deal meant $25 million in cash for Eos, plus a $75 million credit line that otherwise would be payable to Medarex as milestones and royalties for use of its HuMAb Mouse technology. Last fall, Eos raised $27 million in a placement of preferred stock. (See BioWorld Today, February 15, 2000, p. 1; and Sept. 28, 1999, p. 1.)

"We've got about $25 million in the bank now, and commitments from Medarex that extend about another $90 million, in terms of credit and cash," Martin said. "We have enough cash for aggressive growth for a couple of years, including some clinical trials," and that's not counting the Medarex credit still available.

"There are not cancer vaccines in the marketplace yet, but [the area of research] certainly looks a lot better than it looked five years ago," he said, adding that Aventis' preclinical assays promise accurate sorting of targets by scientists there.

"They really seem to know what they're doing," he said. "It's not as if we're going with a start-up."