Novartis and Schrödinger have entered into a research collaboration and licence agreement worth over $2.4bn to advance multiple drug candidates for Novartis to develop and commercialise.
The alliance will see the companies combine their existing research efforts to identify and advance drug candidates for undisclosed targets in Novartis’ core therapeutic areas.
Though details of the programmes have not been disclosed, Novartis’ areas of focus include cardiovascular, renal and metabolic diseases, immunology, neuroscience and oncology.
Schrödinger and Novartis will both be responsible for the discovery of development candidates under the collaboration, while Novartis will take on clinical development, manufacturing and global commercialisation.
In exchange, Schrödinger will receive $150m upfront and will be eligible for up to $892m in research, development and regulatory milestone payments. Schrödinger will also be in line for up to $1.38bn in commercial milestones and tiered mid single-digit to low double-digit royalties on net sales of each product commercialised by Novartis.
Karen Akinsanya, president of research and development, therapeutics at Schrödinger, said: “We are delighted to work with Novartis and leverage [its] strong expertise to jointly advance several of Schrödinger’s existing non-oncology discovery programmes as well as collaborate on additional programmes.”
The partners have also announced an expanded three-year software agreement that “substantially increases” Novartis’ access to Schrödinger’s computational predictive modelling technology and enterprise informatics platform.
Schrödinger says its computational platform enables “highly accurate” in silico predictions of key molecular properties across vast chemical space.
Novartis will now be able to deploy the company’s full suite of drug discovery technologies across its research sites, with Schrödinger set to provide comprehensive support to ensure full integration and optimisation of the platform.
Also commenting on the collaboration, Fiona Marshall, president of biomedical research at Novartis, said: “We are excited to build on our long-standing relationship with Schrödinger, leveraging [its] discovery platform and physics-based computational methods to accelerate our drug discovery efforts.”
The agreements come just two weeks after Novartis’ Scemblix (asciminib) was granted accelerated approval by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat a new subset of chronic myeloid leukaemia patients.