Gowling WLG's award-winning Life Sciences team has advised long-standing client Sosei Heptares on a new collaboration with AbbVie to target inflammatory diseases.
The collaboration will seek to leverage Sosei Heptares' unique StaR® technology and SBDD platform for discovering novel medicines that modulate GPCRs. The primary focus on novel small molecules targeting inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. AbbVie may then pay license fees to exercise its exclusive license options and assume responsibility for global development and commercialisation.
Under the terms of the agreement, Sosei Heptares is eligible to receive up to US$32 million in upfront and near-term milestone payments, as well as potential option, development and commercial milestones of up to $377 million, plus tiered royalties on global commercial sales. AbbVie also has the option to expand the collaboration up to a total of four targets.
Gowling WLG's head of life sciences, Patrick Duxbury and director Jenny Davies led on the deal.
Pat Duxbury said: "This collaboration is a significant transaction that will hopefully lead to new treatments for inflammatory diseases. In our advisory role, we drew on our thorough understanding of Sosei Heptares' business and our deep sector experience".
Sosei Heptares is an international biopharmaceutical group focused on the discovery and early development of new medicines originating from its proprietary GPCR-targeted StaR® technology and structure-based drug design platform capabilities. They are advancing a broad and deep pipeline of novel medicines across multiple therapeutic areas, including CNS, immuno-oncology, gastroenterology, inflammation, and other rare/specialty indications. The group has established partnerships with some of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, including AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Genentech (Roche), Novartis, Pfizer and Takeda, and additionally with multiple emerging biotechnology companies.
AbbVie is a research-based global biopharmaceutical company, to discover, develop and commercialise novel medicines that modulate G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) targets of interest to AbbVie.
Gowling WLG's global Life Sciences team combines extensive sector expertise with full-service capability. With a reputation for being "excellent for corporate and investment transactions" and "complex licence, research and collaboration agreements" (Chambers UK 2019), its clients range from global pharmaceutical companies and leading research and academic bodies, to small private companies and start-up businesses.