Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) and Repertoire Immune Medicines have entered into a multi-year strategic collaboration worth over $1.8bn to develop tolerising vaccines for up to three autoimmune diseases.
The agreement will see Repertoire use its T cell receptor-epitope discovery platform, DECODE, and lipid nanoparticle delivery technology to discover and develop the vaccine development candidates, with the biotech also set to deploy DECODE to monitor immune responses to the vaccines in patients during clinical development.
Repertoire will lead all activities through to development candidate nomination, after which point BMS will lead clinical development, regulatory affairs and commercialisation of the vaccines under an exclusive global license.
In exchange, Repertoire will receive an upfront payment of $65m and up to $1.8bn in future development, regulatory and commercial milestones, as well as tiered royalties.
Autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis, occur when the normal role of the immune system is disturbed, resulting in it mistakenly attacking healthy cells in the body.
It is estimated that up to 50 million people in the US have an autoimmune disease, making it the third most prevalent disease category, following cancer and heart disease.
Repertoire says its DECODE platform allows it to decipher the entire immune synapse in order to “fully characterise cellular immune responses in human disease”. This reveals “critical insights” into cellular immune function, which the company then translates into immune-based medicines for multiple therapeutic areas.
Francisco Ramírez-Valle, senior vice president and head of the Immunology and Cardiovascular Thematic Research Center at BMS, said: “Our collaboration with Repertoire aims to selectively reset the immune system, reflecting a key component of our immunology research strategy, which we believe may offer long term benefit while mitigating unintended consequences associated with broad immune suppression.”
Also commenting on the alliance, Torben Straight Nissen, chief executive officer of Repertoire and executive partner of Flagship Pioneering, said: “We are excited to collaborate with BMS to combine [its] leadership in immunology with our unique ability to discover key disease-associated epitopes in patients with autoimmune diseases.
“This collaboration enables us to serve patients suffering from autoimmune diseases by translating our DECODE discoveries into potentially transformative medicines that address the underlying cause of their disease.”