Nxera Pharma clinches $10m milestone payment from AbbVie
AbbVie sells Humira – a blockbuster drug developed in Cambridge – and has a multi-target discovery collaboration with Nxera, which has research facilities locally at Granta Park.
The partners say they have reached an important R & D milestone under a partnership targeting neurological diseases resulting in AbbVie paying $10 million to Nxera.
The collaboration was launched in 2022 to leverage Nxera’s NxWave™ platform to discover, develop and commercialise new medicines targeting novel G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) targets for neurological diseases.
Nxera is eligible to receive up to $40m in near-term research milestones as well as further potential option, development and commercial payments stacking up to $1.2 billion, plus tiered royalties on global sales.
Stacey Southall, VP Platform Technology at Nxera Pharma, said: “The achievement of the first milestone in this collaboration is testament to the expertise and diligence of our platform technology team to deliver multiple stabilised target GPCRs (NxStaRs) to support further structure-based drug design (SBDD).
“Our history of collaborating with AbbVie demonstrates our highly productive working relationship and complementary capabilities, and we look forward to continuing the next stages of this project.”
Nxera Pharma is a technology powered biopharma company hunting new specialty medicines to improve the lives of patients with unmet needs in Japan and globally.
As well as several products being commercialised in Japan, it is advancing an extensive pipeline of over 30 active programs from discovery through to late clinical stage internally and in partnership with leading pharma and biotech companies.
The pipeline is focused on addressing major unmet needs in some of the fastest-growing areas of medicine across neurology, GI and immunology, metabolic disorders and rare diseases and leverages the power of Nxera’s GPCR-targeted structure-based drug discovery NxWave™ platform to provide a sustainable source of best or first-in-class candidates.
Nxera employs more than 350 people at key locations in Tokyo and Osaka (Japan), London and Cambridge (UK), Basel (Switzerland) and Seoul (South Korea) and is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
