Pfizer and Flagship Pioneering are continuing to fill in the blanks for their 10-program partnership, unveiling agreements with two more Flagship-founded biotechs to chase targets in obesity and lung cancer.
One of these programs will involve using Ampersand Biomedicines’ Address, Navigate, Determine (AND) platform to program biologic medicines to specifically target tissue-selective metabolic pathways with the aim of providing a “potent approach to potentially improving metabolic health” and treating obesity. It marks the second obesity-related program to be disclosed as part of the overall Big Pharma-VC agreement.
The other program announced this morning will harness Montai Therapeutics’ CONECTA platform to pinpoint new small molecules that could be effective against the oncogenic mechanisms that drive cancer cell growth.
No financial details of the collaborations were released. However, Pfizer and Flagship committed $50 million each for the opportunity to develop 10 programs when they launched their overarching collaboration in July 2023. Each successful drug from the partnership could be worth as much as $700 million in various milestones and payments.
“Pfizer has deep expertise in cardiometabolic health and cancer drug discovery,” Charlotte Allerton, head of discovery and early development at Pfizer, said in the Nov. 20 release. “We believe that Ampersand's innovative platform and the computational tools of Montai have the potential to unlock novel approaches to targets in these areas of significant unmet need.”
Ampersand and Montai have become the third and fourth publicly named Flagship offshoots unveiled as part of the Big Pharma-VC pact. The general purpose of the programs covered by the collaboration is to address unmet needs within Pfizer’s core strategic areas of interest. The Big Pharma can pluck partnerships from Flagship’s ecosystem that currently spans 40 companies.
This June, Pfizer and Flagship also picked obesity as the first target in the billion-dollar, multiprogram collaboration. The New York pharma giant is now working with Flagship’s ProFound Therapeutics to find new proteins and determine whether they can be used for new obesity therapeutics. They followed this up with a deal to use Quotient’s somatic genomics platform to discover new targets for two programs in cardiovascular and renal diseases.
Paul Biondi, Flagship Pioneering general partner and president of pioneering medicines, said today’s collaborations “will separately leverage the pioneering bioplatform technologies of Ampersand and Montai to perform research, which may lead to future opportunities to develop new therapies in areas of critical unmet need.”
“With four Flagship-founded companies now actively working with our Pioneering Medicines team to advance research activities under our partnership with Pfizer, we are demonstrating how this Innovation Supply Chain Partnership could enable more rapid innovation by uniting Flagship's ecosystem of diverse bioplatforms with Pfizer's disease and therapeutic development expertise to bring about breakthroughs in drug development,” Biondi added in the release.
When it comes to Ampersand, Jason Gardner—who is both CEO of the biotech as well as being a CEO-partner at Flagship Pioneering—said the company’s so-called AND-Body Therapeutics “represent a new type of programmable biologic that have a significantly improved therapeutic index when compared to non-targeted medicines, making them an attractive modality to address new targets for the treatment of obesity.”
Meanwhile, Montai’s platform is designed to “integrate leading edge computational tools to decode links between hard-to-drug biological pathways and novel small molecule solutions from an untapped source of diverse human-qualified chemistry called Anthromolecules,” according to the release.
“We look forward to exploring how CONECTA's integrated chemistry-biology approach can precision match novel small molecules that interfere with cancer cell's intrinsic mechanisms to inhibit tumor growth, with the ultimate goal of developing a potential therapeutic for patients suffering with lung cancer,” said Margo Georgiadis, co-founder and CEO of Montai as well as another of Flagship’s CEO-partners.