Servier Pays €0.75 Million To Vernalis For Milestone In Oncology Studies
By Cyndi Root
Vernalis will receive a €0.75 million payment from Servier following the achievement of the companies’ second milestone in their drug discovery efforts last week. The companies treated their first patient in a Servier sponsored Phase I trial with their new cancer drug candidate, a selective BCL-2 inhibitor.
“Under the collaborations Vernalis receives fees and a share in the future success of any products in the form of development milestones and royalties on sales. Financial terms are not disclosed,” according to Servier. The continued studies will utilize Vernalis’ proprietary fragment and structure-based drug discovery platform on a number of oncology targets, of which only BCL-2 is disclosed.
BCL-2 is the first drug candidate discovered through the companies’ ongoing oncology collaboration, which is aimed at discovering anticancer drug candidates selective for individual BCL-2 family members. Sevier and Vernalis have partnered since May 2007. They began Phase I of this study in June 2014.
According to the research, proteins of the BCL-2 family are crucial regulators of apoptosis. Deregulations of this protein family play a major role in the aberrant survival of tumor cells. Within this protein family, BCL-2 belongs to the pro-survival members and is often overexpressed in tumor cells. Pro-survival BCL-2 family members have been recognized as attractive therapeutic targets in oncology for more than twenty years, but drug discovery research on this class of target is particularly challenging and requires innovative chemistry supported by structural biology.
“Our experience with Vernalis shows that small molecules tailored against specific targets can have very high therapeutic potential,” Jean-Pierre Abastado, Director of the Center of Therapeutic Innovation in Oncology at Servier, said. “This success was achieved through a comprehensive chemistry and biology research program with our teams identifying and characterizing this promising BCL-2 inhibitor. This new compound further extends Servier’s portfolio beyond kinase inhibitors, HDAC inhibitors, and immunotherapeutic products.”
In April 2014, Vernalis also announced progress in its research with Tris Pharma, achieving a proof-of-concept (POC) for CCP-07, which was their second program to achieve this milestone in their U.S. prescription cough cold collaboration. The companies expect to file a new drug application (NDA) for CCP-07 in the second half of 2015.
Servier announced last week that they, along with Galapagos NV, achieved a second partial milestone for a new osteoarthritis candidate. On March 7, Galapagos announced the receipt of €2 million as the first partial milestone. This latest payment was not disclosed.