Part of Vivek Ra­maswamy and Matt Gline’s ex­pan­sive uni­verse of “vants,” the lit­tle-known de­grad­er play Pro­teo­vant has silent­ly been chip­ping away for more than a year. Now, Blue­print Med­i­cines will take a bet on that biotech and its AI-fo­cused sis­ter firm.

Blue­print will pay $20 mil­lion up­front and a po­ten­tial $632 mil­lion in ad­di­tion­al down­stream mile­stones for two pro­tein de­grad­er pro­grams from Pro­teo­vant with the op­tion to add two more pro­grams to the slate, the part­ners said Mon­day.

Blue­print will hold ex­clu­sive de­vel­op­ment and com­mer­cial­iza­tion rights to both pro­grams with Pro­teo­vant keep­ing an op­tion to take 50% of those re­spon­si­bil­i­ties for the sec­ond pro­gram, ac­cord­ing to a re­lease.

Cob­bled to­geth­er back in late 2020 as Roivant’s plat­form for pro­tein de­graders af­ter its ac­qui­si­tion of On­copia Ther­a­peu­tics, Pro­teo­vant’s tie-up with Blue­print is the biotech’s first and one in a grow­ing string of li­cens­ing deals around buzzy de­grad­er tech­nol­o­gy.

Ac­cord­ing to its web­site, Pro­teo­vant is de­vel­op­ing de­graders that work by bind­ing tar­get pro­teins and E3 lig­as­es to­geth­er, ef­fec­tive­ly mark­ing those pro­teins for de­struc­tion. It’s an ap­proach sim­i­lar to that of “mol­e­c­u­lar glues,” which lever­age the body’s nat­ur­al process­es to elim­i­nate un­want­ed pro­teins.

Kate Hav­i­land

Mean­while, the com­pa­ny is al­so bring­ing along sis­ter biotech Van­tAI as part of the deal, with plans to use that firm’s com­pu­ta­tion­al bi­ol­o­gy ap­proach to dis­cov­er the lead pro­grams.

For Blue­print, a move in­to pro­tein degra­da­tion comes as the small phar­ma looks to the fu­ture af­ter long­time CEO Jeff Al­bers steps down from the role April 4 with plans to hand the reins over to COO Kate Hav­i­land. Al­bers, who han­dled the com­pa­ny’s tran­si­tion from biotech with the ap­proval of Ay­vak­it back in ear­ly 2020, will side­step in­to the chair­man role with the firm.

With that ini­tial ap­proval in hand, Blue­print has been work­ing hard to find its next win­ner, seed­ing its pipeline with some big-dol­lar deals. In No­vem­ber, the com­pa­ny bought a pre­clin­i­cal can­di­date from Lengo Ther­a­peu­tics for $250 mil­lion up­front and more than $215 mil­lion in mile­stones. For that deal, Blue­print bet on a non-small cell lung can­cer pro­gram that Al­bers said has the po­ten­tial to in­hib­it all com­mon EGFR ex­on 20 in­ser­tion vari­ants.

The Pro­teo­vant deal plans to tar­get on­col­o­gy as well as hema­tol­ogy, the com­pa­nies said.

The mRNA player Moderna is further cementing its presence on the African continent.

Moderna announced on Thursday that it has finalized an agreement with Kenya’s government to partner up and bring an mRNA manufacturing facility to the east African nation. The new facility aims to manufacture up to 500 million doses of vaccines annually. Moderna also said the new facility will have the ability to spike its production capabilities to respond to public health emergencies on the continent or globally.

ViiV Healthcare has teamed up with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool and three generic manufacturers to expand access to medicine that can prevent HIV.

ViiV and the Medicines Patent Pool jointly announced Thursday that the MPP signed sub-licensing agreements with Aurobindo, Cipla and Viatris to manufacture generics of a long-acting form of cabotegravir for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). As a result of the agreement, the manufacturers will be able to develop, manufacture and supply generic versions of cabotegravir LA in 90 countries — subject to regulatory approvals.

Belgian biotech Confo Therapeutics has landed $183 million, plus potential royalties, in a drug-discovery deal with Daiichi Sankyo.

Early Thursday, Confo Therapeutics put out word of the deal that will be focused on small molecule antagonists to go after an undisclosed target that the company says is associated with CNS diseases.

Confo CEO Cedric Ververken told Endpoints News that Daiichi originally reached out to learn about the biotech’s technology. He added that Confo, founded in 2015, will use its platform to drug a GPCR target that Daiichi has struggled with internally.