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Seeking to develop novel medicines for cardiovascular disease, Novartis and ProFound Therapeutics have signed a four-year strategic collaboration. The agreement will allow the partners to combine ProFound’s protein identification capabilities with Novartis’ expertise in cardiovascular drug development.
Under the terms of the collaboration, ProFound will receive $25 million in upfront and near-term milestone payments with the potential transaction value from downstream milestones of $750 million per selected target, with additional potential for tiered royalties.
Key to the collaboration is the ProFoundry platform, developed by ProFound Therapeutics. The company claims that the platform combines multi-layered sources of biological data with advanced computational tools to study and validate novel protein drugs and drug targets within the expanded human proteome. Since its launch, ProFound has used the platform to uncover tens of thousands of novel proteins including insights on their functions, connectivity, and roles in health and disease.
John Lepore, MD, ProFound’s CEO and Flagship Pioneering CEO-partner noted that the collaboration “validates the power of our ProFoundry Platform to go beyond traditional target discovery approaches by tapping into the vast, largely unexplored biology of the expanded human proteome.” He added that the partnership with Novartis is an “opportunity to accelerate the discovery of entirely new targets and support the development of transformative therapies to address the growing global burden of cardiovascular disease.”
ProFound already has a partnership with Pfizer focused on developing protein therapies for treating obesity. Under the terms of that agreement, Pfizer will have the option to advance selected research programs after early validation activities by ProFound.
