Chiron Corporation and XOMA Ltd. announced a worldwide, exclusive, multi-product, collaborative agreement for the development and commercialization of antibody products for the treatment of cancer. Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will jointly research, develop, and commercialize multiple antibody product candidates.

"This agreement represents an important milestone in the growth of Chiron's oncology franchise," said Craig Wheeler, president, Chiron BioPharmaceuticals. "Our research engine has successfully identified a number of potential targets, and XOMA is a great partner for helping us to generate antibodies against those targets and accelerate advancing them through the development process. Our collaboration will help Chiron further build on the capabilities of our BioPharmaceuticals management team, as the company continues to invest in attractive opportunities for value creation."

"Our collaboration with Chiron represents significant growth in our product pipeline in the cancer arena and also demonstrates the value of the work XOMA has done in building multiple capabilities and experience in biopharmaceutical development, especially in the monoclonal antibody field," said John Castello, XOMA's CEO. "We are excited about joining with Chiron and view this as a way for both companies to maximize their strengths. It also takes advantage of the breadth of capabilities that we've built up, ranging from phage display and our proprietary Human Engineering technologies, through process development and manufacturing scale-up, to preclinical, clinical and regulatory capabilities."

Under the agreement, the companies will share development and commercialization expenses, including preclinical and clinical development, manufacturing, and worldwide marketing costs, as well as revenues, generally on a 70-30 basis, with Chiron's share being 70 per cent and XOMA's share being 30 per cent. XOMA will receive an initial payment of $10 million and a loan facility of up to $50 million to fund its share of development expenses. The collaboration will initially focus on preclinical, process development and scale up work, with a potential Investigative New Drug (IND) filing anticipated early on in the collaboration.