Increasing Treatment Availability

Licensing, Collaborations & Joint Ventures

Licensing deals can make promising cancer treatments available more widely. When licensors and licensees look to form these long-term partnerships, they turn to Ropes & Gray.

With one of the largest licensing practices in the world, we help large pharmaceutical companies, innovative biotechnology and medical device start-ups, and more mature enterprises and academic institutions structure and negotiate complex collaboration agreements involving the license of intellectual property and the collaborative development and commercialization of potentially lifesaving medicines. We have extensive experience with early- and late-development stage products, approved products, platform technologies, and drug discovery deals for a range of cancer treatments employing small molecules, targeted gene editing therapies, immunotherapies, cell therapies, antibody-drug conjugates and more. Our global team—spanning the United States, Europe and China—also counsels on the regulatory, health care, data privacy, patent, antitrust and tax issues that arise in these types of deals.

We advise on:

  • Licensing and collaboration agreements
  • Outsourcing agreements
  • Co-promotion, marketing and distribution agreements
  • Manufacturing and supply agreements
  • Technology transfer arrangements
  • Joint ventures

Our Work with Clients

Licensing HUTCHMED’s Pivotal CRC Therapy Worldwide

Ropes & Gray represented China-based HUTCHMED in an exclusive worldwide licensing agreement with Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.—one of the largest China out-licensing deals to date. The transaction brings HUTCHMED’s colorectal cancer treatment fruquintinib to an expanded patient population, including in the United States. Partners Marc Rubenstein and Katherine Wang discuss Ropes & Gray’s work.