A Dutch-American biotech is out with $65 million in Series A funding to get into the clinic with what it calls an expanded scope of the popular antibody-drug conjugates class after a decade of legwork iterating on the original click chemistry findings that led to last year’s Nobel Prize.

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By BioWorld Twelve years on from spinning out of Philips Healthcare, Tagworks Pharmaceuticals BV has raised $65 million in a series A round to take a new generation of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) based on click chemistry into the clinic. Read more.

By BioCentury Netherlands-based Tagworks is using click chemistry to simultaneously accomplish on-target activation of ADCs and off-target deactivation of radiopharmaceuticals. After spinning out of Philips Healthcare in 2011, the company has announced a $65 million series A round co-led by Ysios Capital and Gilde Healthcare. Download the complete article here.

Tagworks congratulates Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless with winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry ! Their discoveries made a massive impact on many areas of science and form the foundation of Tagworks' Click-to-Release approach. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2022/summary/  

Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal, and K. Barry Sharpless receive prize for their work on reactions that quickly link molecules and the application of the reactions in living cells Three scientists have won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Carolyn R. Bertozzi of Stanford University, Morten Meldal of the University …

Bioorthogonal chemistry, already a workhorse of drug discovery research, prepares for the leap into human testing. Researchers at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York are preparing the first test in humans of a new type of diagnostic that combines a radioisotope and antibody via bioorthogonal ‘click’ chemistry. …

Tagworks reports that the scope of its proprietary click-to-release reaction can be expanded from the cleavage of carbamates to ethers, potentially allowing more drug types to be released from their click-cleavable ADCs. https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.201800402

Tagworks is featured in a BioCentury article on the state of the art and clinical prospects of in vivo click chemistry. https://www.biocentury.com/bc-innovations/tools-techniques/2017-06-15/new-use-click-chemistry-vivo-can-trigger-rapid-drug-?kwh=clear%3C%7C%3Eclears

In a recent publication in the scientific journal Bioconjugate Chemistry, Tagworks Pharma describes its success in using a bioorthogonal reaction for the selective cleavage of tumor-bound ADCs in mice. This represents a powerful new tool for ADC therapy as it does not rely on the currently used biological activation mechanisms, …