Bayer executives were keen to stress to Fierce this summer that the German pharma giant’s appetite for dealmaking hasn’t been curbed by a groupwide restructuring. Its latest cancer-focused collaboration suggests Bayer has indeed retained a taste for intriguing new modalities.
The company has signed a deal worth more than half a billion biobucks to partner up on two programs with NextRNA Therapeutics, a biotech working on long noncoding RNA (lncRNA)-driven diseases. The collaboration will focus on oncology indications with high unmet need, the companies said in an Aug. 28 news release.
NextRNA will be in line for a total of $547 million across upfront and near-term milestone payments, research funding and development and commercial milestone payments, on top of tiered royalties on net sales should either of these programs make it to market.
Further details are limited, although the companies did reveal that one of the programs is a lncRNA-targeting small molecule already in early preclinical development at NextRNA. The second program will revolve around a target selected by Bayer from a number of options already identified by NextRNA’s platform.
This platform combines NextRNA’s computational engine NextMap with what the biotech describes as “deep lncRNA biology expertise and a diverse set of biochemical, biophysics and chemistry capabilities.”
NextRNA was founded in 2021 as one of the ways to advance the work of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Carl Novina, M.D., Ph.D., whose lab made a number of discoveries related to the biology of noncoding RNAs and their dysregulation in cancers.
“This collaboration recognizes lncRNAs as an exciting target class and confirms NextRNA’s position as both a leader in this space and a partner-of-choice for companies seeking to develop transformative small molecule therapeutics across disease areas,” NextRNA’s co-founder and CEO, Dominique Verhelle, Ph.D., said in this morning’s release.
“We look forward to working closely with the Bayer team to advance first-in-class cancer therapies while continuing to build our pipeline in oncology and neuroscience,” Verhelle added.
The Boston-based company’s tech is designed to inhibit the function of lncRNAs by disrupting the interaction between lncRNAs and RBPs with small molecules. The aim is to unlock a “vast class” of new therapeutics, the companies said.
“With NextRNA’s exceptional expertise and lncRNA platform, we aim to advance novel small molecule therapeutics against a new class of targets in oncology,” Juergen Eckhardt, M.D., head of business development and licensing at Bayer’s Pharmaceuticals division, said in the release. “This partnership further adds to our mission to build one of the most transformative and diversified oncology pipelines in the industry.”
The news of the collaboration comes two months after Eckhardt told Fierce that despite thousands of redundancies across Bayer, the company aims to maintain its position as an “innovation powerhouse.”
“Oncology is one of our key focus areas; we’re also constantly out there in the market, checking what would be a good fit for us,” Eckhardt said during the June interview.