Evotec bags US$45m upfront in Celgene deal

The 5-year R&D contract triggered an upfront payment of US$45m to Evotec, which is eligible for US$250 million in milestones and double-digit royalties. Under the agreement, the Hamburg-based company will screen its own as well as Celgene’s compound library Celmod against iPSC-derived disease models for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson's disease (PD) etc. Celgene has the option to in-license the global rights to programmes resulting from the collaboration.

Rupert Vessey, EVP and President of Research and Early Development at Celgene, said that the company has some evidence that its Celmod library includes compounds that can direct the degradation of proteins known to be neurotoxic. “Screening for this activity in highly controlled cell-based screens developed by Evotec represents an excellent initial approach for drug discovery in neurodegenerative disorders,” he added.

According to Evotec’s CSO Cord Dohrmann, the available preclinical models have “limited predictive and translational value”, as proven by the high clinical failure rate of experimental treatments for neurodegenerative diseases. “The use of patient-derived disease models for drug screening represents a paradigm shift as it places the testing of human disease relevance at the front end of the drug discovery process and is expected to lead to the discovery of more disease-relevant drug candidates but also more focused clinical development paths,” he stressed.

Evotec has built its industrialised iPSC infrastructure over the last five years in collaboration and under licence with the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, particularly in motor neuron disease. Additional aspects of the platform were built up through a collaboration with the CHDI Foundation in the field of Huntington’s disease.