BioCentury
ARTICLE | Strategy

MER-made

How Dong-A revamped its R&D to move into first-in-class products

January 28, 2017 1:03 AM UTC

Dong-A ST Co. Ltd. has spent the last four years building an R&D organization and using its chemistry chops to begin developing first-in-class drug candidates against genetically validated targets. A December cancer immunotherapy deal with AbbVie Inc. is the first payoff from the work.

AbbVie agreed to pay Dong-A $40 million up front and up to $485 million in milestones for exclusive worldwide rights outside of South Korea to preclinical inhibitors of c-Mer proto-oncogene tyrosine kinase (MERTK), a class of molecules AbbVie also was working on...