South San Francisco-based Dualitas Therapeutics has signed a research collaboration and license agreement with Roche, granting the Swiss pharma access to its DualScreen Bispecific Discovery Engine to screen more than 300,000 bispecific antibody combinations across immunology and inflammation (I&I) indications. Dualitas receives USD 36.5 million upfront and is eligible for research, development, and commercial milestone payments plus tiered royalties, with a potential total deal value of up to USD 1 billion. Roche assumes responsibility for all subsequent preclinical development, regulatory, manufacturing, and commercial activities.
The DualScreen platform, as described by Dualitas, screens entire cell surfaces to interrogate the proximity biology of hundreds of thousands of unique bispecific combinations across a wide range of targets and epitopes — an approach the company says identifies bispecific antibody candidates with synergistic activities not achievable through conventional target-pair selection. No specific development candidate has been nominated under the collaboration; the agreement covers access to the discovery engine itself, with Roche retaining the right to advance candidates it selects into development.
The deal arrives roughly 12 months after Dualitas raised a USD 65 million Series A co-led by Versant Ventures and Qiming Venture Partners USA, and after the company nominated DTX-102 as its lead internal development candidate alongside the appointment of Karim Dabbagh as CEO. The Roche agreement is structured to run in parallel with Dualitas' internal pipeline — which also includes DTX-103 in allergic disease and DTX-101 in dermatologic and gastrointestinal autoimmune disease — rather than replacing it.