Roche Paid $36.5 Million to Screen 300,000 Bispecific Combinations
- Dualitas Therapeutics announced a research collaboration and licence agreement with Roche on 17 September 2026 covering bispecific antibodies for immunology and inflammation. Dualitas receives $36.5 million upfront against a potential total of up to $1 billion, plus tiered royalties.
- Dualitas will use its DualScreen engine to functionally screen more than 300,000 novel bispecific combinations, which both companies describe as one of the largest-scale bispecific discovery efforts attempted. Roche takes responsibility for all subsequent preclinical development, regulatory work, manufacturing and commercialisation.
- The platform screens entire cell surfaces rather than pre-selected target pairs, interrogating what Dualitas calls proximity biology across a range of targets and epitopes. Boris L. Zaïtra, head of corporate business development at Roche, states bispecifics remain central to Roche’s portfolio strategy across many disease areas.
- Founded in 2023, Dualitas retains its own pipeline: DTX-102 in rheumatoid arthritis, DTX-103 in allergic disease and DTX-101 in dermatologic and gastrointestinal autoimmune disease, which the company says enter the clinic next year.
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Roche has not bought a molecule or a target. It has bought a search across 300,000 combinations, and the structure separates who does the finding from who does everything after.
- The scale is the product. Conventional bispecific programmes start from a chosen target pair and optimise. Screening more than 300,000 combinations across whole cell surfaces inverts that: the pairing is an output rather than an input. A buyer paying $36.5 million for that is paying for the absence of a hypothesis.
- The split is unusually clean. Dualitas discovers, Roche runs preclinical, regulatory, manufacturing and commercial. That leaves a company founded in 2023 free to keep 3 internal candidates moving toward the clinic next year without carrying development cost on the partnered work.
- Compare the disclosure against the same day’s other platform deal. Dualitas separated $36.5 million from its $1 billion headline, roughly 3.65%. Orbis Medicines and Novo Nordisk announced a $1.4 billion collaboration hours earlier without separating the upfront at all. One number can be assessed and the other cannot.