Evotec seals billion-euro deal with BMS for protein destroyers

Frankfurt With a new deal worth billions, the German biotech company Evotec is expanding its existing alliance with the US pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) in the field of “protein destroyers”. This is a new class of active pharmaceutical ingredients that can possibly be used in a variety of ways and in which pharmaceutical companies are currently investing heavily.

As part of the alliance, Evotec will receive an upfront payment of USD 200 million and, according to its own statements, expects further success-based and program-based success payments in the near future. These can add up to a possible total of five billion dollars. In addition, the Hamburg biotech company is entitled to a share in sales if the alliance results in approved and marketed products.

In terms of potential total volume, this is the largest research alliance that Evotec has signed to date and also one of the largest deals of its kind in the world.

On the one hand, the partnership underlines the strong role that Evotec now plays as a research partner for large pharmaceutical companies. In addition to BMS, the company’s customers and partners also include pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer, Sanofi, Takeda, Merck and Boehringer Ingelheim.

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With sales of 618 million euros last year and a market value of 4.3 billion dollars, Evotec is currently number three in the German biotech industry behind Biontech and Qiagen. The stock rose 15 percent Tuesday night in response to the BMS deal.

On the other hand, the transaction also underlines the generally growing enthusiasm of pharmaceutical companies for the concept of so-called protein degradation. The aim is to use the cell’s own systems for breaking down superfluous molecules in a targeted manner for pharmaceutical therapies. For this purpose, disease-relevant, harmful proteins are marked with special molecules for the disposal system of the cells.

Hopes especially in cancer therapy

While many conventional drug molecules, in particular the frequently used antibodies, aim to block the function of harmful proteins, the protein degraders are intended to ensure that these are completely eliminated.

This could be an advantage, especially in cancer therapy, where the aim is often to switch off molecular growth factors. Protein degraders could have a longer-lasting and more thorough effect here by triggering the complete breakdown of the unwanted signaling molecules.

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In addition, researchers see the possibility of using the new class of active ingredients to attack target molecules that were previously considered “undruggable”, i.e. were completely inaccessible to classic active pharmaceutical ingredients due to their structure.

Another advantage of the approach is that it involves comparatively small, chemically synthesizable active ingredients. They are significantly cheaper to produce than antibodies or cell therapies.

So far, no protein degraders have been approved on the market, but the first representatives of this class of active ingredients are now in advanced clinical tests, including, for example, several cancer drug candidates from BMS.

Large pharmaceutical companies rely on a new concept

In view of the clinical advances and the broad therapeutic potential, the concept has now become one of the hottest research fields in the pharmaceutical industry. In the past few months alone, in addition to the BMS/Evotec alliance, there have already been four other cooperation agreements between big pharma groups and biotech companies in the field, each with a potential volume of more than one billion dollars.

A few days ago, for example, the Darmstadt-based Merck Group agreed an alliance with the British biotech company Amphista, in which new protein-degrading therapeutics in the field of cancer and immunology are to be researched. The potential total payments for three programs were given as around one billion dollars. Amphista was also able to conclude another deal of a similar volume with BMS.

The US group Amgen got involved in deals with the US companies Arrakis and Plexium at the beginning of the year and intends to invest more than 1.5 billion dollars in these alliances if successful. A few months ago, Novartis joined forces with British Dunad Therapeutics in a $1.3 billion deal to also develop several active ingredients based on protein degraders.

In 2021, Bayer acquired US biotech firm Vividion, which is also heavily involved in the field. Pfizer, Sanofi and Abbvie had already formed alliances in protein degrader research over the past two years.

BMS and Evotec have been working together in this area since 2018. The cooperation has proven to be extremely productive and has produced a promising pipeline for molecular glue degraders, the companies said. Due to this success, the partnership will be extended by another eight years.

According to the companies, the “molecular glue degraders” are small, drug-like compounds that cause the protein ubiquitin to be attached to the respective target molecule. This, in turn, triggers the subsequent breakdown of the offending protein, which BMS believes results in a long-lasting therapeutic effect. The US group considers itself a leader in the field.

Cord Dohrmann, head of research at Evotec, counts the protein degraders among the most exciting innovations in the pharmaceutical industry, “since they can be developed in a highly selective and effective way to degrade high-quality therapeutic target structures and thus even reach molecular target structures that are considered inaccessible by other means”.

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