GSK is officially cutting ties with Ideaya Biosciences, handing back two clinical programs as part of the termination of a 2020 licensing agreement.
The breakup was initiated by GSK on Dec. 4, Ideaya disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week, and will take effect 90 days following GSK’s written notice. In the meantime, GSK will transfer the last two remaining assets from its Ideaya collaboration back to its former partner.
GSK and Ideaya shook hands in a 2020 pact to collaborate on Ideaya’s synthetic lethality pipeline, which brought GSK in on a Werner Helicase inhibitor, a Pol Theta Helicase inhibitor and a prospect targeting the methionine adenosyltransferase 2a (MAT2A) gene.
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Under the deal, Ideaya received a $100 million upfront cash payment and took on 20% of global development costs for its GSK-partnered products, plus 50% of U.S. profits for the MAT2A and Werner Helicase programs. GSK was meant to cover all development and commercialization costs for the Pol Thera program, and the companies hoped to explore combinations of GSK and Ideaya programs.
“GSK and Ideaya have a vision to bring the next generation of innovative precision medicine therapies to patients utilizing the approach of Synthetic Lethality, and a highly complementary pipeline that has the potential to deliver transformative benefit for patients,” Ideaya’s chief scientific officer Michael Dillon, Ph.D., said at the time.
In 2022, GSK whittled down the list of collaborative programs in focus to two when it waived its rights to exercise an option for the exclusive license to Ideaya’s MAT2A inhibitor, which Ideaya acknowledged was a “less compelling” avenue for GSK after it had terminated two programs that might have been combination therapy partners.
With Ideaya’s Werner Helicase and Pol Theta programs back to its sole ownership, the company will “evaluate its strategic options” for the two in 2026, it said in the filing, further noting that it still expects its cash runway to extend to 2030 despite the GSK update.
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GSK did not immediately respond to Fierce Biotech’s request for comment.
Ideaya’s synthetic lethality pathway to precision medicine focuses on a genetic interaction in which a mutation in one gene is harmless but causes cell death when combined with another gene. The concept has led to a bustling pipeline for Ideaya, which has been keeping busy lately through partnerships with Gilead Sciences, Hengrui and Biocytogen. Most recently, the company attracted a new partner and new income in Servier through a $210 million deal for ex-U.S. rights to Ideaya’s clinical-stage protein kinase C inhibitor darovasertib.
Meanwhile, the MAT2A inhibitor GSK first walked away from in 2022 recently showed promise in an early-stage study evaluating its benefits in certain urothelial cancer patients when combined with Gilead’s Trodelvy.
