Eli Lilly has entered into an exclusive licence agreement worth over $620m to gain rights to QurAlis’ investigational precision therapy for neurodegenerative diseases including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD).
The deal gives Lilly global rights to develop and commercialise QRL-204, a splice-switching antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) designed to restore the function of the UNC13A gene, and other UNC13A-targeting compounds.
In exchange, QurAlis will receive an upfront payment of $45m and will be eligible for future milestone payments of up to $577m, plus tiered royalties on net sales.
UNC13A is an essential regulator of neurotransmitter release at synapses and is implicated in approximately 63% of ALS cases and 33% of FTD cases.
Andrew Adams, senior vice president, neurodegeneration research, and director, Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine, said: “Genetic precision medicines like QRL-204 that target specific causal components of disease pathology hold great promise for delivering meaningful advances against a range of neurodegenerative diseases like ALS and FTD.”
Preclinical data recently presented at this year’s International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases and Related Neurological Disorders demonstrated that QurAlis’ UNC13A splice-switching ASOs modulate UNC13A splicing and restore normal synaptic activities in ALS and FTD.
The agreement will also see the companies collaborate to identify and develop additional candidates targeting UNC13A using QurAlis’ proprietary FlexASO splice modulator platform.
Kasper Roet, chief executive officer and co-founder of QurAlis, said: “This partnership enables QRL-204 to rapidly move toward the clinic, while we continue to advance our other lead programmes.
“We look forward to combining our complementary strengths to uncover additional candidates that target UNC13A that have the potential to transform the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases like ALS and FTD and beyond.”
The deal comes just two weeks after Lilly entered into a strategic multi-target discovery collaboration agreement with Aktis Oncology in a deal worth more than $1bn to develop novel anticancer radiopharmaceuticals.
The collaboration will combine Aktis’ radiopharmaceutical platform and Lilly’s expertise in oncology drug development and commercialisation to develop first-in-class and differentiated therapeutics for a variety of solid tumours.