Takeda Pharmaceutical and Advinus Therapeutics have entered into an agreement to initiate a three-year discovery collaboration focused on novel targets for major therapeutic areas, including inflammation, CNS, and metabolic diseases. In this collaboration, Advinus is responsible for leading the programmes to create optimal IND ready compounds for pre-defined targets.
Advinus is a research-based pharmaceutical company, which creates long-term value through internal and collaborative innovative drug discovery, and is building on a strong track record of efficient solutions to address some of the key challenges facing biopharma industry’s R&D productivity. Advinus’ proprietary pipeline demonstrates its ability to create a timely and sustainable flow of IND candidates. The multi-year collaboration will be built upon this foundation, with the goal to develop INDs for both pre-existing and novel targets.
Under the terms of the agreement, Takeda will receive worldwide commercial rights to drug candidates emerging from this alliance. Advinus will receive guaranteed research funding of $36 million over the term of the collaboration, $9 million in milestones leading to candidate selection, and is eligible to receive future clinical and regulatory milestone payments of up to $45 million per product, plus royalties on product sales worldwide.
“Collaboration with Advinus is one of our initiatives to enhance our research productivity. We are very excited to partner with Advinus as they have innovative approaches to efficiently generate INDs that will further strengthen Takeda’s drug discovery capabilities, while also enhancing our pipeline,” said Dr Paul Chapman, General Manager of the Pharmaceutical Research Division, Takeda.
“Advinus team is delighted that its biggest ever collaboration has been made possible by Takeda’s visionary leadership, and their confidence in the founding principles that aim to create these new R&D opportunities. Takeda and Advinus teams together will advance globally networked innovation for addressing key Pharma R&D issue – R&D productivity for better return on R&D investments,” added Dr Rashmi Barbhaiya, Chief Executive Officer, Advinus.
Dr Ajay Kumar Sharma, Associate Director – Pharma & Biotech, Healthcare Practice, Frost & Sullivan, South Asia & Middle East said, “This is a good start as largely the Indian CRO’s were considered for their costs for chemistry process involving drug manufacturing. The pre-discovery or the biology processing was largely absent in outsourcing deals. Advinus has been focussing on developing its own drug candidates for quite some time and now with the support of Takeda coming in there would be no surprise if the world sees some blockbuster drugs coming out of their arsenal in the next decade. This move will also increase the confidence for other big pharma’s to re-think their strategies.”
EP News Bureau