By Siddhi Mahatole
Sept 17 (Reuters) – Orbis Medicines said on Thursday it had signed a drug discovery and licensing deal with Novo Nordisk worth up to $1.4 billion to develop oral therapies for cardiometabolic diseases that are traditionally treated with injectable drugs.
Here are the details:
• The deal includes upfront and milestone payments to Orbis, as well as tiered royalties on future product sales.
• Danish drugmaker Novo will also make a strategic investment in Orbis, the privately held company said.
• Orbis and Novo declined to disclose the investment size and the breakdown of the potential $1.4 billion deal.
• The multi-target collaboration will use Orbis’ AI-enabled nGen platform to discover macrocycles, a class of molecules that could be used to turn treatments traditionally delivered by injection into oral form.
• The ring-shaped macrocycles can potentially address disease targets that are difficult for conventional small-molecule drugs to reach.
• Orbis CEO Morten Graugaard said in an interview that its synthetic macrocycles had achieved up to 18% oral bioavailability, a measure of how much of a swallowed drug reaches the bloodstream, in preclinical studies.
• “Together with Novo, we have an opportunity to unlock a new generation of oral medicines for cardiometabolic diseases and demonstrate the transformative potential of AI-enabled macrocycle drug discovery,” Graugaard said.
• A Novo spokesperson said the collaboration builds on SNAC, its oral peptide absorption technology acquired along with U.S. drug delivery company Emisphere Technologies in 2020 and developed since.
• “We continue to drive innovation in this area through our internal research and in collaborations with other companies,” the spokesperson said.
• Johnson & Johnson won U.S. approval in March for Icotyde, an oral macrocyclic peptide for plaque psoriasis, and Merck secured approval in July for Lipfendra, an oral macrocyclic peptide that lowers cholesterol.
(Reporting by Siddhi Mahatole in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)
