Novartis is paying $105 million upfront to task Antares Therapeutics with generating small molecules against historically undruggable oncology targets.
Antares spun out of Scorpion Therapeutics in 2025 after Eli Lilly bought the biotech’s PI3Kα pipeline for up to $2.5 billion. Scorpion gained a reputation for finding novel binding sites, uncovering a hidden pocket on PI3Kα in the pursuit of a mutant-selective molecule and applying its toolkit to undruggable proteins. Antares started life with the capabilities and team behind Scorpion’s successes.
Novartis is harnessing Antares’ covalent drug discovery engine to go after “a limited number” of targets. While the targets have historically been undruggable, Novartis is betting Antares’ screening libraries, chemical proteomics capabilities and structure-driven computational chemistry resources can crack the challenges.
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Antares will lead all research activities. Novartis has options on the programs. If the Swiss drugmaker exercises its options, Antares could receive up to $1.8 billion in option fees and milestones, plus tiered royalties that top out in the low double-digit range.
The agreement leaves Antares free to advance its wholly owned and partnered portfolio. AstraZeneca paid Scorpion $75 million in 2022 to partner on drug candidates against transcription factors. The next year, Scorpion landed a deal with Pierre Fabre Laboratories worth up to $553 million in biobucks. Pierre Fabre acquired global rights to the two Scorpion programs last year.
Novartis is the first company to publicly strike a deal with Antares, which launched with a $177 million Series A round just over one year ago. The deal provides fresh funding for internal programs, the most advanced of which Antares has tipped to reach the clinic this year, and evidence that the capabilities that made Scorpion attractive to Big Pharma have survived the spinout process.
Like many of its peers, Novartis has kept its deal teams busy this year. Novartis paid $2 billion upfront in March to acquire Synnovation Therapeutics’ pan-mutant-selective PI3Kα inhibitor program, which could compete with Lilly’s ex-Scorpion asset. The Big Pharma has also bet billions in biobucks across deals with Excellergy, Orionis Biosciences, SciNeuro Pharmaceuticals and Unnatural Products.
