Rome-based Angelini Pharma has inked a multi-year deal with Massachusetts biotech Quiver Bioscience to advance novel therapies for genetic epilepsies, which could garner up to $120 million in milestone payments for the latter.
The collaboration includes an undisclosed financial sum from Angelini covering an advanced payment and certain research activities, according to a Feb. 23 release. In return, Angelini will gain exclusive access to data generated during the partnership, while Quiver is eligible to receive up to $120 million—plus potential royalties—if Angelini decides to move forward with drug targets identified during the deal.
Quiver’s mission is to accelerate neurological therapeutic discoveries by leveraging artificial intelligence models and its genomic positioning system (GPS) tech, which is a drug discovery and safety assessment platform.
Now, Angelini will have access to Quiver’s tech in hopes of better understanding developmental and epileptic encephalopathies, which are a group of rare pediatric diseases that include treatment-resistant seizures and development regression. While often caused by genetic mutations, the partners noted that these mutations aren’t well understood and underscored the unmet need for more effective therapies.
Angelini’s Chief Scientific Officer, Rafal Kaminski, M.D., Ph.D., said via release that the two organizations aim to develop unique data and “generate novel scientific insights on a scale and richness that has been unprecedented in this area of research.”
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Angelini Pharma and parent Angelini Industries have been on a tear of investments and acquisitions over the past couple of years, most recently partnering with the EU’s investment arm, the European Investment Bank, to invest 150 million euros (about $174.3 million) into biotech, medtech and digital health companies over the next six years in Europe.
Last fall, Angelini penned a half-billion-plus biobucks deal to acquire a preclinical neuro asset from South Korean biotech Sovargen that gave it exclusive licensing rights to the candidate and its potential to address neurological conditions.
The latest Angelini deal is meant to continue to deepen the company’s roster of neurological candidates and is a significant development for Quiver, which announced a $2 million grant from the federal government last summer that takes aim at developing a platform to predict the safety and tolerability of central nervous system-targeted antisense oligonucleotide therapeutics.
Quiver CEO and co-founder Graham Dempsey, Ph.D., expressed his excitement about the partnership with the Italian conglomerate and developer of antidepressant blockbuster Trazodone.
“By leveraging altered electrophysiology in response to genetic perturbations as the core neuronal classifier and integrating paired multi-modal data, we aim to link functional phenotypes with the underlying molecular drivers,” Dempsey said via release.
The Quiver-Angelini collaboration adds to the growing list of some of the biggest names in biopharma inking AI drug development deals. Earlier this year, Eli Lilly and Nvidia entered a five-year, $1 billion agreement to form an AI co-innovation lab, while Takeda and Iambic Therapeutics came together in a $1.7 billion biobucks deal surrounding Iambic’s suite of AI drug development platforms.
