Pharmaceutical Market Europe • October 2023 • 6-7
NEWS
Seagen and Nurix announce oncology partnership worth over $3.4bn
Seagen and Nurix Therapeutics have agreed on a multiyear, multi-target strategic collaboration worth more than $3.4bn to advance a new class of medicines for use in cancer.
The companies will work to combine antibody-drug conjugation (ADC) and targeted protein degradation (TPD) to create drugs with new mechanisms of action and improve specificity and anti-cancer activity.
Under the terms of the agreement, Seagen will provide an upfront payment of $60m to Nurix, with the potential to receive up to approximately $3.4bn in certain milestone payments across multiple programmes, as well as tiered royalties on future sales.
As part of the collaboration, clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company Nurix will utilise its proprietary DELigase platform to develop targeted protein degraders against multiple targets nominated by Seagen that are suitable for antibody conjugation.
Seagen will conjugate these degraders to antibodies to make a new class of medicines called degrader-antibody conjugates (DACs) and advance DAC drug candidates through preclinical and clinical development and commercialisation.
If successful, several DAC drugs could be developed and commercialised through this collaboration.
“We believe that DACs may represent a next generation of cancer medicine for a wide range of solid tumours and haematologic malignancies,” said Arthur Sands, president and chief executive officer of Nurix.
Moderna and Immatics announce oncology collaboration worth over $1.7bn
Moderna and Immatics have announced a collaboration agreement worth over $1.7bn aimed at developing ‘novel and innovative’ cancer therapies.
The partnership will combine Moderna’s mRNA technology with Immatics’s T-cell receptor platform and cover various therapeutic modalities such as bispecifics, cell therapies and cancer vaccines.
The research will include applying the mRNA technology for in vivo expression of Immatics’s half-life extended TCR bispecifics (TCER) targeting cancer-specific HLA-presented peptides.
The companies will also leverage Moderna’s mRNA experience alongside Immatics’s tumour and normal tissue data included in its Xpresident target discovery platform and Xcube bioinformatics and AI platform to develop mRNA-based cancer vaccines, as well as evaluate Immatics’s IMA203 TCR-T therapy targeting preferentially expressed antigen in melanoma (PRAME) in combination with Moderna’s investigational PRAME mRNA-based cancer vaccine.
Immatics will receive an upfront payment of $120m and could receive milestone payments exceeding $1.7bn, plus royalties for the sales of TCER products and certain vaccines. Immatics will also have the option to join a global profit-and-loss share arrangement for the most advanced candidate.
Moderna will lead the development and commercialisation of the cancer vaccines resulting from the collaboration, while Immatics will be responsible for preclinical and potential early-stage studies for the IMA203 TCR-T and PRAME mRNA vaccine combination.
Merck announces partnerships worth $1.3bn with BenevolentAI and Exscientia
German pharma company Merck has announced two new drug discovery collaborations with BenevolentAI and Exscientia to harness artificial intelligence (AI)-driven design and discovery capabilities to accelerate drug discovery.
The partnerships are expected to generate several new clinical development drug candidates in key therapeutic areas of oncology, neurology and immunology.
Three potential targets have been selected to initiate each partnership, with the potential of identifying and nominating additional targets in the future.
The collaborations will focus on advancing small-molecule development candidates, which Merck will select for further preclinical and clinical development.
As part of the agreements, both UK-based companies will receive upfront payments from Merck and will be eligible for future milestone payments plus tiered royalties.
Exscientia will receive an upfront payment of $20m and up to $674m in milestone payments if all three projects meet their objectives.
Meanwhile, BenevolentAI is set to receive a low double-digit million-dollar upfront payment from Merck, as well as milestone payments that take the value of the partnership to $594m.
Merck has already generated its own AI-based drug discovery engine, known as Aiddison, which aims to improve the probability of identifying drug-like molecules against a target and reduce the need to synthesise and screen compounds for activity in labs.
AstraZeneca partners with Verge Genomics in deal worth over $880m
AstraZeneca’s rare disease unit Alexion and AI-drug discovery biotech Verge Genomics have partnered to identify new drug targets for rare neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases in a deal potentially worth over $840m.
The four-year collaboration will utilise Verge’s AI- and machine learning-enabled Converge drug discovery platform to find multiple targets with a ‘higher probability of clinical success’.
Instead of starting with cell or animal models, Verge’s platform uses a library of genomic datasets taken directly from human tissue, combined with a human-centred biology platform to ‘rapidly advance new data insights into clinical candidates’.
Alexion will select high-potential targets for each indication and will have the option to license and advance successful targets through clinical development and commercialisation.
In exchange, Verge will receive up to $42m in upfront and near-term payments and will be eligible to receive up to $840m in milestone payments plus royalties. Alexion will also take an equity position in Verge.
Seng Cheng, senior vice president and head of research and product development at Alexion, said: “By leveraging Verge’s AI-enabled platform in combination with data from patient tissue samples, we see potential in helping researchers more efficiently identify and validate therapeutic targets for rare diseases.”
Boehringer and Lilly’s Jardiance approved by MHRA for kidney disease
Boehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly’s Jardiance (empagliflozin) has been approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to treat adults with chronic kidney disease (CKD).
Approximately 7.2 million people in the UK are affected by CKD, a long-term condition characterised by a gradual loss of kidney function.
With CKD mostly being asymptomatic until the later stages of the condition, most patients go undiagnosed, and every year up to 45,000 people in the UK die prematurely from CKD and its related complications.
Jardiance, which is already approved in the UK to treat type 2 diabetes and heart failure, is a once-daily oral inhibitor of the sodium glucose co-transporter-2 that works by increasing sugar lost in the urine.
The MHRA’s latest decision is supported by results from the late-stage EMPA-KIDNEY trial, which evaluated the effects of Jardiance on kidney disease progression and cardiovascular mortality risk in 6,609 patients across a wide range of underlying causes.
The study met its primary endpoint, showing that Jardiance reduced the risk of kidney disease progression or cardiovascular death by 28% versus placebo.
A 14% reduction in all-cause hospitalisations versus placebo was also demonstrated, meeting one of the pre-specified key secondary confirmatory endpoints of the study.
EC approves Otsuka and Astex’s Inaqovi for acute myeloid leukaemia
The European Commission (EC) has approved Otsuka Pharmaceutical and Astex Pharmaceuticals’s Inaqovi (oral decitabine and cedazuridine) as a monotherapy in certain acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) patients.
The EC’s decision, which specifically applies to adults with newly diagnosed AML who are ineligible for standard induction chemotherapy, makes Inaqovi the first oral hypomethylating agent approved in the European Economic Area for this patient population.
AML is the most common form of acute leukaemia in adults. In Europe, the incidence of AML is increasing, rising from 3.48 per 100,000 population in 1976 to 5.06 in 2013.
Current treatment options for adults with AML range from hospital-administered intravenous (IV) chemotherapy infusions or, for those who are unable to receive chemotherapy, regimens based on parenterally administered hypomethylating agents.
By inhibiting cytidine deaminase in the gut and liver, Otsuka and Astex’s decitabine and cedazuridine fixed-dose combination is designed to allow for oral daily administration of decitabine over five days in a given cycle to achieve comparable systemic exposure to IV decitabine administered with the same dosing regimen.
The EC’s approval is supported by results from the late-stage ASCERTAIN trial, in which the fixed-dose combination demonstrated pharmacokinetic exposure equivalence to a standard five-day regimen of IV decitabine.
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