Just two years after its launch, privately held Inhibrx LLC hooked Celgene Corp. in its first antibody license. The deal for the undisclosed target potentially could exceed $500 million, including up-front, clinical and regulatory milestone payments and royalties on commercial sales.

Although he declined to reveal details of the agreement, Inhibrx co-founder and CEO Mark Lappe said the funding makes the small biotech "capital independent."

Based in La Jolla, Calif., Inhibrx plans to limit its activities to biotherapeutics discovery and development, with an internally developed pipeline of monoclonal (mAb) and other antibodies, as well as fusion proteins.

The company is focusing on target discovery and selection and moving promising candidates through preclinical development before seeking to out-license them to biotechs and big pharmas for clinical development and commercialization.

Lappe was mum on the mechanism of action for the initial program but said it generated "considerable interest from a number of pharmaceutical companies" when Inhibrx shopped it around before Celgene closed the deal.

Inhibrx's scientists will work collaboratively with Summit, N.J.-based Celgene over the next year to advance the program. At that point, the big biotech will assume full responsibility for further development.

Inhibrx has 11 additional candidates under development in oncology, inflammatory disease and metabolic conditions, according to Lappe. They range from "very novel – no references in the literature – to highly differentiated biologics to validated targets," he said.

The company's goal is to develop a half-dozen programs per year and license three to four annually – 30 to 40 over the next decade – to partners, and "we're on target" to meet that timetable, Lappe told BioWorld Today.

The strategy is not unprecedented. Plenty of new business models, such as product development companies, have emerged over the years to help shepherd preclinical assets across the so-called "valley of death" until they can demonstrate proof of principle and attract the eye of a partner. (See BioWorld Insight, July 18, 2011.)

But Inhibrx is different in several ways. For starters, the firm was mostly self-funded by its founders, with a few private investors supplying some additional capital. The company has no intention of going public or seeking additional financing, Lappe said.

Secondly, the company has no plans to expand significantly. Although Inhibrx may grow its head count modestly, from eight current employees to 10 or 11, "our idea of building a biologic drug development company is to do it very efficiently and to be prolific," Lappe explained.

The company operated quietly after its formation in 2010, but its founders are no strangers to biotech. Lappe was managing partner of Efficacy Biotech Fund, which had a major investment in antibody screening company Arius Research Inc., of Toronto, acquired in 2008 by Roche AG, of Basel, Switzerland, for $189.2 million. (See BioWorld Today, July 24, 2008.)

Scientific founders Quinn Deveraux, vice president of research and development, and Brendan Eckelman, vice president of scientific operations, both came from the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF), the San Diego division of the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) that handles the earliest of early stage research.

Novartis boasts more than 130 internally developed programs that have advanced into clinical trials, and NIBR is the engine that drives the pipeline. Many are first-in-class molecules; GNF helped create first-in-class programs for cancer, malaria and cord blood transplantation. (See BioWorld Insight, May 21, 2012.)

Deveraux led groups on the conception and development of novel target identification and validation and directed the GNF's first therapeutic antibody program.

Eckelman was instrumental in creating a number of GNF's platforms in protease biochemistry, cell death signaling pathways and protein engineering. At Inhibrx, he pioneered the development of the company's VAST-mAb platform and other antibody development, engineering and optimization technologies.

The three were introduced by John Reed, CEO and executive chairman of the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla. All were seeking to build a better mousetrap to translate ideas into candidates ready for the clinic – "the key bottleneck in the industry," Lappe observed.

"That's where everyone chokes," he said.

The co-founders agreed up front that Inhibrx would not become another drug developer.

"A number of companies are extremely good at clinical development and commercialization," Lappe explained. "We can license to many of them."

Inhibrx plans to differentiate itself from other discovery companies by maintaining a strict focus on therapeutic lead generation, selection, functional enhancement and optimization.

The company's technologies are designed to break immune tolerance and amino dominance, to expand epitope diversity and to pursue highly conserved targets. Inhibrx also has developed discovery platforms to enhance functional activity and other properties.

"We've developed a number of platforms internally," Lappe said. "But at the end of the day, we look for the best way to make the optimal therapeutic for a target."