Novartis Just Paid $1.1 Billion for a Drug That Hasn't Touched a Human

Myricx has two lead ADC programs, one targeting a protein called B7-H3 and another targeting HER2 (a well-known breast cancer marker). Both are preclinical, meaning they've shown promise in lab and animal studies but haven't been tested in people yet. The company had said it expected to enter human trials sometime in 2026, though there's no public confirmation that's happened.

The Origin Story

Myricx spun out of Imperial College London and the Francis Crick Institute, two of the UK's premier research institutions. Its founders, Ed Tate, Roberto Solari, and Andrew Bell, built the company on academic work supported by Cancer Research UK.

The venture capital pedigree is impressive too. Brandon Capital and Sofinnova Partners backed the seed round in 2020. Then in July 2024, Myricx raised a £90 million Series A (roughly $114 million) co-led by Novo Holdings and Abingworth, with Eli Lilly joining as a strategic investor. When Lilly puts money into your Series A, people notice.

From seed funding to a $1.5 billion acquisition in about six years: that's a venture capital home run by any standard.

Why Novartis Changed Its Mind

Novartis didn't just wake up one morning and decide ADCs were cool again. The competitive landscape forced its hand.

Consider the deals happening around it. Pfizer and Innovent signed a $10.5 billion collaboration in 2026 covering multiple ADCs. Gilead acquired Tubulis in a deal worth up to $5 billion. Boehringer Ingelheim licensed Synaffix's ADC technology in early 2025 in a deal worth up to $1.3 billion in potential milestone payments. Every major pharma company is loading up on conjugate assets, and sitting on the sidelines was starting to look less like discipline and more like denial.

But Novartis didn't go for a me-too play. Instead of buying a late-stage ADC with a familiar payload, the company bet on differentiated science: a novel payload platform that could produce multiple ADC candidates across different tumor targets. It's the difference between buying a single house and buying the construction company.

The Risk-Reward Math

Let's be honest: $1.1 billion upfront for preclinical assets is a bold bet. Most drugs that look great in lab dishes never make it through human trials. The failure rate in oncology is brutal; roughly 95% of cancer drugs that enter clinical testing don't reach approval.

Novartis structured the deal to manage some of that risk. The $400 million in milestones only gets paid if Myricx's programs hit specific development targets. That's a meaningful chunk of the total value tied to actual progress. Still, $1.1 billion is a lot of money to put down before seeing a single data point from human patients.

The bull case goes something like this: if NMTi payloads work as hoped, Novartis doesn't just get one or two drugs. It gets a platform that can generate ADCs against multiple cancer targets for years to come, with a payload mechanism that competitors can't easily replicate. In a world where six ADCs already generate over a billion dollars each annually, the upside of owning a differentiated platform is enormous.

The bear case is simpler. Novel chemistry is novel for a reason; sometimes it's because nobody could make it work safely in humans. Preclinical promise and clinical reality are separated by a valley that has swallowed countless biotech dreams.

What This Means for the ADC Arms Race

The Myricx deal confirms something that's been building for the past two years: the ADC gold rush isn't slowing down. If anything, it's intensifying. Big pharma buyers are willing to pay enormous premiums for technology that offers even a chance at differentiation.

The pattern is clear. Financing for early-stage ADC companies fell sharply in 2025, pushing smaller players toward partnerships or sale. Meanwhile, the biggest players (Daiichi Sankyo, Roche, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Gilead, and now Novartis) are consolidating the space through aggressive deal-making. China-origin ADC licensing has surged as well, creating another pipeline of assets flowing into global pharma portfolios.

For Novartis, this acquisition is an admission and a statement rolled into one. The admission: we were wrong to sit out the ADC wave. The statement: we're not going to play catch-up with copycat science. Whether the NMTi platform delivers on its promise won't be clear for years. But at $1.5 billion, Novartis is betting it can't afford to wait and find out.

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