Pfizer is penning a cancer discovery pact with Cartography Biosciences that could max out at $865 million biobucks.
The Big Pharma is offering the California biotech up to $65 million in upfront, near-term milestone and option exercise payments for efforts to discover tumor-selective antigens, according to a Jan. 6 release. If all options are exercised and all milestones are met, Cartography could collect a total up to $865 million, plus tiered royalties on net sales.
Under the terms of the deal, Cartography will use its drug discovery platforms—coded Atlas and Summit—to find and validate tumor-selective antigens in an undisclosed disease area. Both platforms are built off a dataset that includes hundreds of thousands of cell states from healthy individuals and large-scale profiling of tumor cells.
Atlas and Summit are “designed to uncover target biology that traditional tools simply cannot resolve” in efforts to identify tumor-selective antigens and antigen pairs that could improve therapeutic precision and patient outcomes, Cartography CEO and co-founder Kevin Parker, Ph.D., said in the release.
The multiyear collaboration gives Pfizer the chance to opt into multiple antigens, in which case the pharma would take over all R&D and commercialization activities for the selected programs.
The freshly announced deal comes a few weeks after Pfizer linked up with Seattle’s Adaptive Biotechnologies to leverage the biotech’s bespoke T-cell receptor discovery engine and large-scale immune receptor antigen mapping data. The pact centers on autoimmune indications and includes about $890 million biobucks on the table.
As for Cartography, the South San Francisco company already touts another Big Pharma partner in the form of West Coast-based Gilead. The two paired up in 2024 in efforts to discover drugs for triple-negative breast cancer and a common form of non-small cell lung cancer. Gilead paid out $20 million at the time and is offering an undisclosed amount of biobucks.
Cartography’s lead candidate, called CBI-1214, is a T-cell engager designed to treat colorectal cancer. In December, the FDA greenlit a phase 1 trial for the asset, while also granting the program fast-track status.
The biotech’s pipeline also consists of earlier-stage antibody-based cancer therapies, with the ultimate goal of producing candidates that target tumors more precisely than current treatments.
The company exited stealth in 2022 with a $57 million series A, and then secured a $67 million series B in 2025 that was led by Pfizer’s VC arm.