Almirall S.A. and Mercachem announced today that they have entered into an exclusive discovery collaboration focusing on the development of oral cytokine blockers for the treatment of inflammatory skin diseases.
Under the terms of the agreement, Mercachem will perform iterative optimization campaigns towards the identification of oral cytokine blockers for Almirall to further develop. Almirall will fund Mercachem’s research in this area and perform any future pre- clinical, clinical, regulatory and commercial activities.
Mercachem will receive an upfront payment of EUR 1 million, research fees and is eligible to receive development milestone payments of up to in total maximum of EUR 5.5 million.
Thomas Eichholtz, CSO of Almirall, commented: “We are very happy to enter this research collaboration with Mercachem as it gives us access to groundbreaking technology that allows the identification of small molecules that can block protein-protein interactions. This opens up a whole new category of drug targets of great interest for our therapeutic area, dermatology. The collaboration is another example of our external innovation strategy”.
Gerhard Müller, Senior Vice President Medicinal Chemistry of Mercachem commented: “We are delighted to partner one of our in-house innovation projects with Almirall pursuing lead finding and optimization for a truly challenging target”. He further added: “In a previous joint collaboration with Vipergen we could demonstrate that deep sampling of DNA-encoded libraries employing Vipergen’s BTE assay technology delivered valuable hit classes with high medicinal chemistry utility to address difficult target systems”.
For more information, please visit almirall.com.
