ADCs, TCEs among ‘exciting things’ on Boehringer’s dealmaking shopping list

Boehringer Ingelheim may have been on a spending spree for licensing deals so far this year—but the German pharma has plenty more items on its shopping list. The company kicked off 2026 penning a deal worth over $120 million biobucks with genomics-focused Variant Bio to discover new targets for cardiorenal and kidney disease. In fact, that agreement was secured just weeks after Boehringer signed another kidney collaboration, offering Rectify Pharmaceuticals up to $448 million to partner on a preclinical program. By the end of January, the Big Pharma had also clinched a 1.05 billion euro ($1.26 billion) biobucks deal for a preclinical inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) bispecific antibody from China's Simcere, before rounding off February with a $500 million pact with U.K.-based Sitryx to find a fresh oral treatment approach to a variety of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. It may sound like Boehringer’s blossoming pipeline has enough new additions to keep the company busy, but the drugmaker still has its eye on “a number of exciting things,” according to Paola Casarosa, Ph.D., the member of Boehringer’s board who oversees the company’s innovation unit. “Our key focus is on T-cell engagers, as well as ADCs,” Casarosa told Fierce during a recent interview at Boehringer’s headquarters. Neither of those deal-making priorities will come as a surprise. Boehringer recently took its DLL3/DC3 T-cell engager (TCE), called obrixtamig, into a phase 3 study for small-cell lung cancer. And when it comes to antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), the company not only agreed a $991 million deal to license a candidate from South Korea’s AimedBio last year, but also committed around $31 million to a new R&D facility in Switzerland specifically focused on ADCs. “We still believe ADCs are an exciting modality,” Casarosa said. “We'll continue to also look into [next]-generation payloads and new mechanisms of connecting those to the antibodies.” Other red-hot R&D fields Boehringer is watching include bispecific and trispecific antibodies, plus in-vivo CAR-T therapies. “I see a lot of emerging new platforms, particularly in geographies like China,” Casarosa said. While in-vivo CAR-Ts and TCEs both came to prominence in oncology, biopharmas have increasingly been exploring their potential to treat autoimmune diseases. Boehringer “absolutely” wants to take advantage of the autoimmune potential of cell therapies, according to Casarosa. “It requires more fine tuning … with a different attention to what is the tolerability and the side effects,” she added. “But I think with B cell depletion, we have seen the most exciting data in autoimmunity [in] years. And so that's not something to miss.” A seller’s market When it comes to restocking the pipeline, Casarosa said Boehringer prefers to source drug candidates that haven’t yet made it into the clinic. “That's not written in stone … but we find it works better [when] you have the chance to work together.” This preclinical mentality is certainly useful from a financial perspective, with mid- and late-stage assets increasingly securing hefty price tags from Big Pharmas. “Let's be frank, today it’s pretty much a seller’s market,” Casarosa said. “There are a number of companies that are looking for ways to replenish their portfolio. We're in the fortunate position of not necessarily needing late-stage [drugs], so we can be a bit more creative.” Judging by the recent crop of deals, Boehringer prefers to find partners rather than buy companies outright. But Casarosa denied this is a deliberate strategy—pointing to the past acquisitions of bacterial cancer therapy company T3 Pharmaceuticals in 2023 and Swiss cancer biotech Amal Therapeutics in 2019, among other examples. “It's not that we’ve shied away from that,” she said. “We look at what do we want—is it a totality or is it rather a single asset? You also need to understand what the company on the other side wants.” Picking partners over buyouts doesn’t mean that Boehringer is short of cash when it finds the right option. The drugmaker spent 6.4 billion euros ($7.4 billion) on R&D last year, an 8.3% year-over-year increase. At 22.9% of the 27.8 billion euros ($32 billion) in sales that Boehringer brought in over 2025, Chief Financial Officer Frank Hübler described this R&D-spend ratio as “investing above our peer level.” The company offered a peek at these financials during a March 25 press conference at Boehringer’s headquarters in Ingelheim, Germany. The sprawling site covers 762,000 square meters and, with around 10,000 people employed there, feels like a town in itself. A tour of the site offers vivid illustrations of both Boehringer’s past and future. On the one hand, Fierce walked past a 1960s-built manufacturing facility that is still able to churn out up to 800,000 tablets of the diabetes med Jardiance an hour. Further along is a seven-story chemical innovation plant expected to open in 2027 to turbocharge the company’s small molecule development. Boehringer has been based in Ingelheim since its founding in 1885. From 28 employees manufacturing tartaric acid salts used by pharmacies and dyeing works, the company now employs a workforce of around 54,000 spread over 76 countries. Despite its vast range of human and animal pharmaceutical products and status as a major global player, the company is still owned by the family of its founder Albert Boehringer. One of the ways the company is keeping itself on the front foot is by moving into one of the most-hyped areas of biopharma R&D—obesity. Arguably the most-watched readout this year for Boehringer will be the phase 3 data from an obesity study of survodutide, its Zealand-partnered GLP-1/glucagon agonist. During the press conference, Casarosa batted away suggestions that Boehringer should be concerned by investors’ underwhelming reaction to weight loss data from Zealand’s Roche-partnered amylin analog petrelintide or the Danish biotech’s GLP-1/GLP-2 agonist. “Our collaboration with Zealand is a traditional licensing deal, meaning we are in charge of developing survodutide,” she told journalists at the conference. “The rest of their portfolio is outside this collaboration. So from that perspective, I don't see necessarily any connectivities [with] what is happening with survodutide.” That doesn’t mean that Casarosa can totally ignore what’s happening in the wider obesity space. Novo Nordisk’s rollercoaster stock price across its obesity readouts and sales forecasts serves as a reminder of the high stakes for pharmas that enter the weight loss arena. “I am admittedly not a finance person, but when I see some of these things, I shiver, right?” she told Fierce. “What is driving this madness?” But despite the high expectations for survodutide’s phase 3 readout this year, Casarosa points to the mid-stage data from the drug, which showed near 19% weight loss at 46 weeks. In a separate study, up to 83% of adults treated with survodutide achieved a statistically significant improvement in a liver disease called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH). “Our position remains clearly [that there is] a differentiation on what is the glucagon component and what is the liver health component,” Casarosa said. “The phase 2 data were very clear in showing this strong benefit. I do know the importance of the liver on the totality of the cardiometabolic space, and that's where I believe we have some strength.” Still, Casarosa wouldn’t get drawn into a conversation about whether survodutide will be able to blow the amassing armada of GLP-1 competitors out of the water. “I don't know how many GLP-1s are in development—it's a huge amount,” she said. “So it would be arrogant to say that we clearly have a value proposition that’s going to top everything else.” Survodutide isn’t Boehringer’s only clinical-stage bet in the obesity space. There’s also a triple agonist—although Casarosa was tight-lipped to Fierce about the exact targets of the candidate. Along with a recent push into eye disease, Boehringer certainly hasn’t settled into its comfort zone. And this forward-thinking R&D strategy appeared to have paid off with two recent commercial success stories. The latter half of last year saw Boehringer score FDA approval for HER2-selective tyrosine kinase inhibitor Hernexeos as the first orally administered targeted therapy available for patients with previously treated HER2-mutated lung cancer. Meanwhile, the company also secured the nod from regulators for Jascayd, a PDE4B inhibitor that became the first new therapy for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) in more than a decade. Those launches contributed to a 7.4% rise in human pharma sales over the year, with Jardiance and the IPF pill Ofev continuing to grow, according to the company. Does this recent proof of turning R&D input into commercial success make Casarosa’s job a bit easier? “This company has always been tremendously committed to innovation in the good as well as in the less good days,” she said. “So [the approvals], of course, are a very strong boost of energy and self-confidence to the whole R&D organization.” “That's something that gives a lot of a lot of pride,” she added.