Dive Brief:
- Pfizer will work with two more startups incubated by Flagship Pioneering, which on Wednesday announced that Montai Therapeutics and Ampersand Biomedicines would hunt for drug candidates under an existing collaboration with the pharmaceutical giant.
- Montai aims to unearth new small molecule drugs for lung cancer, while Ampersand will help the pharma discover biologics for obesity. Flagship didn’t reveal financial terms for either deal, though a spokesperson said Pfizer will split R&D costs and has an option to license a program.
- Both deals are products of an alliance Pfizer and Flagship formed in 2023 under the firm’s “Pioneering Medicines” initiative, which enables partners to tap into the research generated by Flagship’s startup portfolio. The alliance is meant to help Pfizer discover up to 10 new drug candidates and has yielded deals with two other Flagship biotechs, ProFound Therapeutics and Quotient Therapeutics.
Dive Insight:
Biotech startups built on broad drugmaking platforms have struggled to attract venture funding over the last few years as investors have migrated to what they see as safer bets. Many, including some startups from Flagship’s own portfolio, have been forced to lay off staff and trim research spending to save cash.
One way platform startups can weather the storm, though, is through drug partnerships. Alliances with larger firms can provide the kind of funding that sustains a startup’s research during lean times and help it hit the kind of milestones that attract further funding.
Flagship’s Pioneering Medicines initiative is one way for its startups to secure those kinds of deals. Since 2023, the firm has already used it to broker broad alliances with Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, GSK and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. In each case, the goal is to help larger firms hunt for drugs in their areas of focus, while giving its startups the opportunity for cash and financial incentives they might not have gotten otherwise.
Montai, a startup using artificial intelligence tools to discover small molecules, focused its initial funds on immune drug research. But that work unearthed the possibility to use its platform against cancer, where there is “enormous” potential, said Margo Georgiadis, Montai’s CEO and co-founder. With Pfizer’s help, it’s now accelerating that initial research.
“We're bringing the chemistry and the machine learning, and they're bringing the knowledge of oncology,” Georgiadis said.
Ampersand is also using computing tools to find new medicines. The company emerged from stealth last year with $50 million in financing and a plan to make biologics that act only at the site of disease. With Pfizer, it intends to target “tissue-selective” metabolic pathways in the hopes of developing medicines that have a wider therapeutic index than other therapies, Jason Gardner, its CEO, said in a statement.
Pfizer is also leaning on ProFound for help finding obesity drugs, and is working with Quotient to develop therapies for heart and kidney diseases.
Novo, meanwhile, has already struck deals this year with Flagship companies Omega Therapeutics, Cellarity and Metaphore Biotechnologies in search of new cardiometabolic medicines. GSK is tapping the firm’s portfolio to hunt for new vaccines and medicines, with an initial focus on respiratory and immunology drugs.
Separately, GSK inked a collaboration last week with Flagship startup Vesalius Therapeutics to develop a potential Parkinson’s disease treatment.
Correction: This story has been updated to clarify that Pfizer and Flagship will jointly share R&D costs.
