Arv­inas has inked an­oth­er Big Phar­ma part­ner­ship to get their pro­tein degra­da­tion en­gines revving — for both hu­mans and crops.

All told, the Ger­man con­glom­er­ate is wa­ger­ing $115 mil­lion on the po­ten­tial of Arv­inas’ tech plat­form, which us­es an E3 lig­ase to tag tar­get pro­teins with an ubiq­ui­tin, flush­ing these dis­ease cul­prits down the cell’s nat­ur­al “garbage dis­pos­al.” And Bay­er is in for the whole pack­age, with a col­lab­o­ra­tion, an eq­ui­ty in­vest­ment and a joint ven­ture in play.

A har­bin­ger of the pro­tein degra­da­tion space, Arv­inas comes of age as peers at C4 Ther­a­peu­tics and Kymera al­so gains pop­u­lar­i­ty among the likes of Bio­gen, Ver­tex and Glax­o­SmithK­line. Com­pared to the tra­di­tion­al in­hi­bi­tion ap­proach, get­ting rid of prob­lem­at­ic pro­teins promis­es to be a much more durable so­lu­tion for dis­eases like can­cer.

Jo­erg Moeller Linkedin

“Be­cause PRO­TACs don’t in­hib­it the tar­get pro­tein’s en­zy­mat­ic ac­tiv­i­ty, but bind their tar­gets with high se­lec­tiv­i­ty, it may be pos­si­ble to re­tool pre­vi­ous­ly in­ef­fec­tive in­hibitor mol­e­cules as PRO­TACs for next-gen­er­a­tion med­i­cines for pa­tients,” Jo­erg Moeller, Bay­er’s head of R&D, said in a state­ment.

On the ther­a­peu­tic side, Bay­er’s to­tal com­mit­ment — up­front, R&D sup­port plus eq­ui­ty — amounts to $60 mil­lion. It gets them the rights to nov­el lead struc­tures Arv­inas gen­er­ates in the process but doesn’t cov­er the ad­di­tion­al $685 mil­lion in po­ten­tial mile­stone pay­ments.

The pact will span car­dio­vas­cu­lar, on­co­log­i­cal and gy­ne­co­log­i­cal dis­eases.

The oth­er $55 mil­lion in the deal goes, in the course of six years, to a joint ven­ture set up to ex­plore how Arv­inas’ tech­nol­o­gy can tack­le the weeds, in­sects or dis­eases en­dem­ic in agri­cul­ture. Where pre­vi­ous crop pro­tec­tion ef­forts have suc­cumbed to re­sis­tance, pro­tein degra­da­tion may be able to re­vive them, the part­ners said.

John Hous­ton Arv­inas

“As the first com­pa­ny found­ed to ex­plore tar­get­ed pro­tein degra­da­tion, we’ve been ex­cit­ed about the po­ten­tial to im­prove the lives of pa­tients since our in­cep­tion,” said Arv­inas CEO John Hous­ton. “This col­lab­o­ra­tion en­ables us not on­ly to ex­pand our plat­form in­to new ther­a­peu­tic ar­eas, but al­so be­gins a new jour­ney in ap­ply­ing our ap­proach to agri­cul­ture.”

The cash ex­changed trumps pre­vi­ous part­ner­ships, in which Genen­tech and Pfiz­er paid less to get dis­cov­ery al­liances start­ed but pledged biobucks, great­ly rais­ing Arv­inas’ pro­file be­fore it even got in­to the clin­ic. Its lead ther­a­py in prostate can­cer is now in Phase I tri­als.

Im­age: Shut­ter­stock

After spending 4 years in a senior post with GlaxoSmithKline’s star team positioning Shingrix for a blockbuster approval, Guillaume Pfefer is headed back to the biotech world — in style.

Pfefer has signed on to join Noubar Afeyan’s busy group of partners at Flagship, and he’s taking the helm of an upstart — which today is being merged with another Flagship startup — with some grand plans of its own. The announcement this morning notes that Pfefer will run Kintai Therapeutics, one of the grads of the Flagship labs.

One of the many inequalities the pandemic has laid bare is the gender imbalance in biomedical research. A paper examining Covid-19 research authorship wondered out loud: Where are the women?

It’s a question that echoes beyond our current times. In the biopharma world, not only are women under-represented in R&D roles (particularly at higher levels), their achievements and talents could also be undermined by stereotypes and norms of leadership styles. The problem is even more dire for women of color.

Three months after Merck published in the New England Journal of Medicine data that left doctors and investors divided over just how well its experimental heart drug worked, the FDA has handed that drug priority review. A decision is now due by January 20, 2021.

Merck first announced the drug, known as vericiguat, as a Phase III success last November. In 2016, Merck had paid $1 billion upfront for US rights to the Bayer-developed drug. Early projections foresaw a few hundred million a year in sales, but the unspecified late-stage success raised the possibility for far more. After all, Novartis’s flagship heart drug, Entresto, was earning $1.7 billion per year and was expected to reach up to $4 billion in annual sales.