Australian peptide drug discovery company Phylogica has announced a collaboration and option agreement with pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen Biotech Inc, to discover new classes of drugs derived from its Phylomer platform.
In the initial stage of the collaboration, Phylogica will identify cell-penetrating peptides.
Under the terms of the agreement, Janssen could develop Phylomer-based drug candidates and has the option to expand the scope of the collaboration to include additional cell-specific Phylomers for the development of a further ten drug candidates.
Under the terms of this multi-product agreement, Phylogica will receive an initial technology access fee as well as research funding over the first 18 months of the collaboration. Pending ongoing discussions with Janssen regarding commercial terms, Phylogica could receive further research funding, license fees, milestone payments and royalties on worldwide sales.
“We are delighted to be working with Janssen, which adds to our growing list of partners,” said Dr Paul Watt, Phylogica’s CEO.
"This deal reflects our commitment to exploit the potential of Phylomers to address challenging disease targets with the aim of delivering new standards of care for patients.
“We look forward to working in partnership with Janssen to advance multiple Phylomer-based drug candidates.
“This agreement provides further validation of our world-leading Phylomer technology for peptide drug discovery.”
Janssen Biotech, Inc is one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson.
With the addition of Janssen, Phylogica has signed deals with four of the top five global pharmaceutical companies; and has made demonstrable progress over the last 12 months with all its collaborative discovery programmes.
Our collaboration with MedImmune, the biologics arm of AstraZeneca, has recently advanced to the final stage of the research plan. Furthermore, in December 2011, we reported the successful completion of the first stage of our collaboration with Pfizer.
These milestones followed our announcement earlier in 2011 that we successfully achieved the objectives in our research alliance with Roche.