Unnatural Products is proving to be a natural at securing partnerships, this time linking up with Novartis in a deal that could garner up to $1.7 billion in biobucks.
Novartis is shelling out $100 million in upfront and preclinical milestone payments to work with the California biotech in efforts to develop next-gen cardiovascular disease therapeutics.
In return, the Swiss pharma will have access to UNP’s artificial-intelligence-guided platform, a discovery engine designed to quickly create potent and selective macrocycles that can be delivered both orally and via injection.
The Big Pharma will be in charge of all investigational-new-drug-enabling studies and any subsequent clinical development, manufacturing and commercialization of potential drugs stemming from the collaboration.
Meanwhile, UNP could bank up to $1.7 billion in development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments, plus tiered royalties on potential annual sales.
The two companies did not share specific indication targets in the research and licensing deal announcement, though UNP’s efforts are designed to address historically undruggable targets.
“This collaboration validates the strength of our program and highlights the ability of UNP’s platform to deliver differentiated macrocyclic therapeutics for high-value biological targets for chronic diseases with high unmet need,” UNP co-founder and CEO Cameron Pye, Ph.D., said in a Feb. 18 release.
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Novartis believes macrocyclic chemistry advances are “opening entirely new avenues in drug discovery, allowing us to engage targets at a dose and with a pharmacological versatility not possible with many other approaches,” according to the company’s global head of discovery chemistry and biomedical research Muneto Mogi, Ph.D.
Novartis isn’t the first company to bet on UNP’s platform—the biotech has already joined hands with Merck & Co., signing onto a deal worth up to $220 million in biobucks back in 2024. More recently, the biotech garnered support from argenx via a deal worth $1.5 billion in biobucks that aims to generate orally available macrocyclic peptide drugs against a range of undisclosed “undruggable” targets.