The objective of the partnership between Evotec and Bristol Myers Squibb is to identify disease-modifying treatments for diverse neurodegenerative diseases
Evotec announces exclusive global license agreement with Bristol Myers Squibb. (Credit: Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash)
Evotec has announced that Bristol Myers Squibb Company has exercised its option to enter into an exclusive global license agreement. This agreement encompasses selected late-stage discovery programmes that were developed and advanced through their collaboration.
The partnership between Evotec and Bristol Myers Squibb was initially established in 2016, focusing on neurodegeneration. The collaboration proved highly successful, resulting in a promising pipeline of programmes spanning from discovery to clinical stages.
Building on this success, Bristol Myers Squibb and Evotec extended and expanded their partnership for an additional eight years in March, aiming to further broaden and strengthen their strategic alliance.
Within the license agreement, Bristol Myers Squibb has chosen undisclosed programs that were rapidly developed and progressed using Evotec’s precision medicine platforms. These selected programmes will undergo further development within the expanded collaboration.
As part of the agreement, Evotec receives a payment of $40m and becomes eligible for performance milestone payments. Additionally, Evotec will receive tiered royalties of up to low double-digit percentages based on product sales.
Evotec chief scientific officer Cord Dohrmann said: “This licence agreement will further bolster our joint pipeline of programmes targeting several neurodegenerative conditions. We are confident that the strong collaboration of the experienced teams at Evotec and Bristol Myers Squibb will make novel innovative treatment options available to patients living with a broad range of neurodegenerative conditions.”
The objective of the partnership between Evotec and Bristol Myers Squibb is to identify disease-modifying treatments for diverse neurodegenerative diseases. Currently available drugs only offer short-term symptom management, highlighting the significant unmet medical need for therapies that can slow down or reverse disease progression in the field of neurodegenerative disorders.
This partnership takes an innovative approach to discovering and developing novel medicines, leveraging Evotec’s modality-agnostic precision medicine platforms. The collaboration has already generated a pipeline of discovery and preclinical-stage programmes. One of the programs, known as BMS-986419 or EVT8683, targeting eIF2b, was licensed by Bristol Myers Squibb in September 2021 after a successful IND application filing with the FDA. It has now progressed into Phase I of clinical trials.