Dive Brief:
- Bristol Myers Squibb is paying nearly $100 million to strengthen its pipeline of experimental neurological disease medicines, opting into rights to several drug candidates being developed by Prothena and Evotec.
- In the deal with Prothena, Bristol Myers will pay $55 million for exclusive global rights to an antibody that targets a protein called tau and is being studied as a potential Alzheimer’s disease treatment. The pharmaceutical company previously licensed U.S. rights in June 2021.
- With Evotec, Bristol Myers is expanding a nine-year old research collaboration, selecting an “undisclosed number” of research programs for further development by the two companies. In return, Evotec will receive $40 million from Bristol Myers.
Dive Insight:
Like many other of its pharma company peers, Bristol Myers had largely backed out of neuroscience by the start of this decade. The company, which bought Celgene in 2019, was instead prioritizing cancer, immune and cardiovascular disease research.
While that’s still the case, the deals with Prothena and Evotec suggest Bristol Myers is again exploring brain drugs, at least in limited fashion. The pharma’s pipeline currently lists four neuroscience drugs in clinical testing, two of which are the Prothena antibody Bristol Myers now has global rights to and an Evotec therapy it previously licensed. (The new deal with Evotec covers earlier-stage compounds.)
In the Prothena antibody, dubbed PRX005, Bristol Myers maintains a foothold in Alzheimer’s disease research, which has been galvanized by the clinical trial successes of Eisai’s Leqembi and Eli Lilly’s experimental donanemab.
“PRX005 becomes a key component of our commitment to the Alzheimer’s disease community and our neuroscience portfolio, and we look forward to continuing its development,” said Richard Hargreaves, head of Bristol Myers’ neuroscience research center, in a statement on that deal.
PRX005 is currently in a Phase 1 clinical trial that’s designed to test multiple ascending doses. Initial results from healthy volunteers showed the drug to be safe, Prothena said in January. Moving forward, Bristol Myers will be responsible for reporting all study updates.
Evotec and Bristol Myers did not disclose the specific diseases the newly licensed compounds are meant to target, although they fall under the companies’ neurodegenerative disease research.