Scandinavian firm could receive up to €172M in development and regulatory milestones
Almirall is paying Nuevolution €11.2 million up front as part of a global collaboration to develop and commercialize novel RORγt inhibitor program for treating inflammatory skin diseases and psoriatic arthritis. Nuevolution could receive up to €172 million in development and regulatory milestones, plus tiered commercial sales milestones of up to another €270 million.
Under terms of the collaboration the partners are establishing a research collaboration to identify additional RORγt inhibitors. Almirall retains an exclusive option to candidates within the dermatological field. Almirall will fund its own additional research, together with with preclinical, clinical, regulatory and commercial activities. Nuevolution will fund its own research.
“This program includes novel NCEs with potential to be one of the first entries into a new class of oral non-steroidal anti inflammatories,’ commented Eduardo Sanchiz, Almirall CEO. ‘We are very pleased with this strategic collaboration with Nuevolution, which reinforces our pipeline and brings an additional potential growth driver to Almirall, as we continue to position ourselves as a leading dermatology player.
Nuevolution is leveraging its proprietary Chemetics® discovery platform for the identification and optimization of small molecule candidates. The firm is developing a preclinical pipeline of drugs targeting cancer and inflammatory diseases. The deal with Almirall comes less than two weeks after Nuevolution announced the award of a three year, DKK 16.4 million grant by Innovation Fund Denmark, to support a collaborative cancer therapeutics research program with researchers at the Biotech Research and Innovation Center (BRIC) at the University of Copenhagen. The project aims to identify small molecule therapeutics that target NSD proteins (histone methyltransferase enzymes), which are implicated in cancers including myltiple myeloma, acute myeloid leukemia and acute lymphatic leukemia.
In October 2016 Nuevolution and Amgen inked an alliance to leverage the Chemetics platform for the discovery of multiple targets in the fields of cancer and neurosciences.
