US immuno-oncology pioneer Agenus has set up at Cambridge Science Park in the UK technology cluster with a small team but big intentions to grow.

The Nasdaq-quoted business has taken the whole building at the former Domantis building at the park occupied by a maiden team of eight. Domantis was sold to GSK for £230 million at the end of 2006.

Agenus has been committed to the field of immuno-oncology for the past 20 years. In the past several years it has expanded its capabilities by adding state of the art platforms and technologies to enable the company to discover, develop, and manufacture key technologies.
 
These include a series of strategic transactions to expand scientific and technological capabilities as well as collaborations with corporate, academic and clinical entities.

The company – headquartered in Lexington Mass –  is positioned to discover and develop a broad range of innovative therapeutic antibodies and vaccines through  focused efforts to assemble a uniquely comprehensive arsenal of complementary technologies.

Since its founding, the company has pursued a nobjective of targeting the immune system to fight disease, while building a broad and flexible immuno-oncology pipeline based on deep expertise in the field of immunology. Agenus’ comprehensive approach to cancer immunotherapy includes a diverse portfolio of antibodies including checkpoint inhibitors and other checkpoint modulators, vaccines and adjuvants.

The company believes that combination therapies and the ability to profile cancer patients will be key drivers of success in substantially expanding the patient population benefiting from current immuno-oncology therapies.

Cancer vaccines are designed to train the immune system to attack cancer cells. To create a cancer vaccine candidate, Agenus takes antigens specific to cancer cells and combines them with a delivery vehicle such as a virus. The presence of a cancer antigen in the context of a viral infection alerts the immune system that the antigen is detrimental and should be eliminated from the body.

Cancer vaccines have the potential to exhibit efficacy in their own right and may also pair optimally with our checkpoint platforms to elicit effective anti-cancer immune responses. This is expected to be particularly relevant in settings in which cancer cells are not recognised as ‘non-self’ by the patient’s immune system.

Agenus’ vaccine platforms use its own proprietary vector systems based on heat shock proteins (HSPs), well-known surveyors of the proteins in the cell. HSPs are involved in transporting other proteins or smaller protein fragments from the interior of the cell to the cell surface for detection by the immune system. HSPs play a natural role in immune recognition of proteins unique to cancer.

The company’s driving force is coisidered to be Garo Armen – co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Agenus Inc., which was formerly known as Antigenics Inc – a biotech that discovered Oncophage, a personalised cancer vaccine approved in Russia for patients with earlier-stage kidney cancer.

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Garo Armen

Cambridge business Marshall Aerospace & Defence Group is part of a defence and technology consortium building a prototype laser weapon for the UK’s MoD.

The MoD is set to ink a £30 million contract for a demonstrator product code-named Dragonfly. The prototype could be delivered as early as 2019.

It is being built by a consortioum led by missile manufacturer MBDA, based in Stevenage, QinetiQ, Leonardo-Finmeccanica, GKN, Arke, BAE Systems and Marshall ADG.

The UK’s first laser weapon could be used on ships against enemy jets and missiles and eventually be deployed by ground troops to take out mortar attacks.

Testing will determine whether Dragonfly can identify and track targets at different ranges and in the most hostile weather.

If Dragonfly lives up to expectations it could replace conventional systems and save the MoD crucial cash at a time when defence budgets are under severe pressure. Requiring only power to fire, Dragonfly does not need expensive ammunition or missiles.

It is one of the systems being developed under the MoD’s £800m Innovation Fund – devised to harness advanced innovation from technology companies and give troops a critical edge in battle scenarios.

Marshall ADG has just been presented with the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the International Trade category by Sir Hugh Duberly, Lord-Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire. The award recognises how, during the course of three consecutive financial years, Marshall saw an increase of almost 70 per cent in its international trade.

During this three-year period, more than half of Marshall’s exports were engineering and support services to airframe OEMs, governments, Air Forces and commercial operators.

Steve Fitz-Gerald, CEO of Marshall ADG said: “It is a great honour to have won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise, for which we are most grateful. It is the most respected of all business awards and to be recognised for our role in the export of the UK’s engineering capabilities, in both commercial and military sectors, is an immense boost to the men and women of our company. 

“Marshall has built an enviable reputation the world over, and we are keen to do our part to strengthen the UK’s prosperity agenda.”

Two things are immediately obvious from this year’s Legal 500 Guide – firstly the Cambridge and East Anglia legal scenes have become stronger than they have ever been. Secondly, there is a hair’s breadth between the expertise on offer from the region’s leading practitioners.

The publisher of The Legal 500 took the decision this year not to try to rate plums against olives so has scrapped its regional heavyweights rankings. It retains its list of leading individuals within specialisms and its rankings of the best firms in tiers based on specific legal disciplines where they can be judged like for like.

The Legal 500 Guide lists 194 lawyers as East Anglian’s leading individuals. Mills & Reeve and Birketts together claim around 27 per cent of the pantheon.

Mills & Reeve boasts 27 leading individuals and Birketts 25. Their nearest rivals are Ashtons Legal with 14, Eversheds with 12, Hewitsons, Howes Percival and Taylor Vinters with nine apiece, Ipswich-based Gotelee with seven and Peterborough duo Buckles and Greenwoods with five each.

While it has scrapped its ‘Regional Heavyweights’ rankings, The Legal 500 has retained its system of placing the best law firms in tiers based on their expertise in different aspects of legal advice.

Mills & Reeve claims 30 number one slots in East Anglia compared to 28 by Birketts. They are streaks ahead of their closest competitors – Eversheds and Taylor Vinters – who each have 10 top tier positions.
Hewitsons claims nine number one rankings, Ashtons Legal eight, Howes Percival seven and Greenwoods six.

The expertise of East Anglia lawyers in the lucrative arena of IT and telecoms is world class. The Legal 500 Guide ranks Eversheds, Mills & Reeve and Taylor Vinters jointly in the top tier.

The burgeoning life science sector has driven many of the major deals in the Cambridge cluster in the last 12 months and multinational players have triggered massive growth in the region. The Legal 500 guide ranks Mills & Reeve and Taylor Wessing as joint top for Biotechnology advice.

Corporate & commercial work in Cambridge is a consistently accurate barometer of a law firm’s success and status. It is no coincidence that three firms with established international profiles are rated joint number ones by The Legal 500 Guide.

The top trio, listed alphabetically as dictated by the guide’s style, are Eversheds, Mills & Reeve and Taylor Vinters. Birketts, Hewitsons and Taylor Wessing share second tier rankings. The cranes over Cambridge are a towering endorsement of the infrastructure improvements and commercial and residential development on a scale never before seen locally. Eversheds and Mills & Reeve are rated joint top for Commercial property work in Cambridge.

Birketts reigns supreme as standalone top tier firm in Ipswich and shares top tier status in Norwich with Howes Percival and Mills & Reeve.

Buckles, Greenwoods and Hunt & Coombs are top tier rated for commercial property work in Peterborough while Ashtons Legal shares a top tier ranking for firms based elsewhere in East Anglia.
Fenners Chambers arguably represents the greatest success story in the entire East of England legal annals.

The bar is one area of the law in the current guide where The Legal 500 feels it acceptable to make a clear differential between the very best and the rest.

Fenners Chambers in Cambridge is the only local set to make the joint number one slot. In a fiercely contested South Eastern Circuit, the firm glories in top spot alongside two other leading UK chambers, both of the them based in Sussex – Crown Office Row (Brighton) and Pallant Chambers (Chichester).

The Legal 500 notes that: “Fenners Chambers has experts in specialist areas such as bankruptcy, aviation and shipping. Araba Taylor is particularly well known for her family business practice and Chancery work.” The firm has a substantial number of leading silks and junior barristers.

Cambridge has become a hotbed of professional firms adept at helping companies in all business sectors leverage and protect their brand in increasingly international – and intensely competitive – markets.
The arrival in February of JA Kemp added to that pool of expertise and means Cambridge now has arguably the best pool of patent and TM attorneys outside of London.

The Legal 500 Guide has retained its ranking system for Patent and Trade mark attorneys and Cambridge’s best do well. Listed alphabetically, Boult Wade Tennant, JA Kemp, Marks & Clerk, Mathys & Squire and Mewburn Ellis of the South East firms with Cambridge offices are all rated in the guide’s top tier for patent attorneys.

In its ratings for Trade mark attorneys, the guide has Boult Wade Tennant, JA Kemp, Marks & Clerk and Stobbs IP in Cambridge among the top tier while Mathys & Squire, Mewburn Ellis and Reddie & Grose in Cambridge take second tier ratings.

For a full breakdown of all the Legal 500 guide’s rankings and assessments of law firms and solicitors in East Anglia, go to www.legal500.com

 Business Weekly’s Law Lords supplement on the guide and the strength of the region’s legal profession will be published in the newspaper’s digital edition after 4pm, September 15, 2016 at http://ift.tt/2cgW23w64ba0bf97eab 

It shows the strength in depth of the Cambridge UK business, science & technology cluster when even a $31 billion Japanese swoop for your greatest ever tech company is put in the shade.

The cream of the crop in a record-busting August was also engineered in the Far East – this time made in China – as the China National Chemical Corporation’s $43bn takeover of crop protection business Syngenta finally cleared its largest regulatory hurdle.

It is the largest ever foreign acquisition by a Chinese corporation and was finally sanctioned by the powerful Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Syngenta has major operations in Cambridge and employs 106 staff at Capital Park.

So, discounting the ARM shareholders’ ratification of SoftBank’s offer – which we included in the July total when both boards agreed the deal – August deals in the Cambridge cluster reached $46.11bn.

That took the accumulative haul in the 41 months of Business Weekly’s Cambridge Deals Digest to $184.03bn – sending the monthly average to a record high of $4.5bn.

There was a nice footnote to the ARM deal when the company awarded local construction firm Kier Group the $63 million contract to expand the superchip architect’s Cambridge headquarters. The HQ upgrade is part of a move to more than double ARM’s UK headcount over the next five years.

As evidence that there remains a Cambridge conveyor belt of new-generation talent bubbling away nicely beneath the hierarchy, Cambridge Innovation Capital raised $83.47m of new cash to invest in the cream of innovation being generated locally.

ARM, the official investment body of the Sultanate of Oman and the much-vaunted Woodford Investment Fund were among new investors in the oversubscribed placing.

CIC, which is headed up by Victor Christou,  provides long-term capital to support the sustained growth of investee companies and has already established an unrivalled position within the Cambridge cluster. To date, it has committed around £33m to 13 companies in the rapidly-growing technology and healthcare sectors.

The new funds raised will be used to provide additional investment to CIC’s current portfolio, to invest in new opportunities created at the University of Cambridge and within the Cambridge Cluster and to expand the CIC team to allow the company to capitalise on its strong inflow of new investment opportunities.

A globally successful business community needs investment in infrastructure and received a timely boost in that regard. Investment in Cambridge rail station as well as better and faster trains and services linking the key trade corridors of Norwich, Cambridge, Stansted and London were at the heart of a multimillion upgrade unveiled by Abellio – confirmed as operator of the new East Anglian rail franchise. The investment is expected to comfortably top $120m.

Biopharma business F-star kept the flag flying high for the cluster’s burgeoning life science sector when it revealed that it may have given birth to a bouncing new $billion baby – F-star Gamma.

The Babraham Research Campus medical technology pioneer struck a deal with US company Denali Therapeutics – based in South San Francisco – which promises a potentially huge payback. The agreement involves the development of bispecific antibodies that can both cross the blood-brain barrier as well as bind to specific targets in the Central Nervous System.

Denali will make an upfront payment to F-star of $6 million. Denali also has the option to acquire F-star Gamma – F-star’s latest asset centric vehicle – prior to the initiation of the first Phase 1 clinical trial in return for aggregate exercise and milestone payments to the F-star Gamma shareholders of up to $450m in total.

If Denali does not exercise the option, it has the right to license a number of mAb² based on each Fcab generated by F-star Gamma in return for licence fees, development, regulatory and commercial milestones payments with a potential aggregate value of $1 billion and tiered royalties on product sales.

The life science segment received another significant boost as Google and GSK teamed up to launch a new $795.72m transatlantic business to be steered simultaneously from the East of England biotech heartland and San Francisco.

The enterprise was created by GSK and Google parent Alphabet’s life sciences unit Verily Life Sciences. On the manufacturing front, inkjet printing pioneer Domino invested $24.86m on a new factory in Changshu, China.

Around 40 business deals whose values were officially undisclosed were estimated to collectively be worth $375m based on respective market caps and turnovers. Property and construction transactions were valued at circa $335m as the sector continued to defy a Brexit backlash.
 

There are more business angels in the hi-tech heaven of Cambridge tonight after ARM Holdings shareholders sanctioned the $31 billion sale to Japanese bidder SoftBank.

ARM employees share an estimated £400 million windfall following ratification of the takeover while CEO Simon Segars and co-founder and CTO MIke Muller together haul in some £54.4m.

Legal, financial and PR advisers to ARM alone are earning £65m from the acquisition process, SoftBank’s parallel advisers slightly less than that.

Seasoned tech observers believe the cash bonanza will trigger a fresh spurt of Cambridge startups with ARM directors and engineers striking out with new ventures.

But the acquisition immediately saw ARM delisted from the London Stock Exchange and, as a result, left the FTSE 100 index some £24bn poorer.

Right to the death, UK politicians and entrepreneurs continued to brand the deal a sell-out for Britain and the technology sector despite SoftBank’s pledge to grow ARM globally from a significantly enhanced Cambridge base.

The bid by SoftBank was spawned by the Brexit vote which left sterling crippled; the offer of 1,700p a share represents almost 50 times ARM’s forecast earnings for the current year.

Pretty much from the outset, ARM’s board had no hesitation in recommending the offer to shareholders. It was reassured that SoftBank pledged to at least double the number of employees employed by ARM in the UK over the next five years under the existing management team on the back of heavy investment.

SoftBank today offered legal guarantees regarding its commitment to growing ARM from Cambridge. It sees ARM’s superchip architecture prowess as the key to unlocking the treasure trove that is the Internet of Things.

Cynical observers said that SoftBank had merely pledged to execute a growth plan that ARM had already set in motion regarding doubling UK headcount from a massively expanded Cambridge mother ship.

They also noted that SoftBank’s pledge only covered the certainty of patronage over the next five years – beyond which no-one knows whether ARM will still be headquartered locally or its fortunes steered from Cambridge?

While beneficiaries of the deal are wading in cash, realists are right to argue that, in many aspects, the acquisition remains a step into the unknown.