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Merck KGaA teams up with Italian oncology group in PARP1 development deal
2022-09-21
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An Italian group has allied itself with Merck KGaA in an oncology licensing deal, seeking to get in on the market opportunity and expand its reach in a possibly blockbuster market.
Merck KGaA and Italian oncology company Nerviano Medical Sciences jointly announced Wednesday that they are collaborating on a licensing deal for NMS’s PARP1 inhibitorPARP1 inhibitor. Called NMS-293, the drug candidate is currently in clinical trials to treat patients as a monotherapy with a specific type of tumor: BRCA-mutated.
The biotech added that there is also research being done with the drug in recurrent glioblastoma, a type of cancer that happens in the brain or spinal cord — as a combination therapy with temozolomide, a chemotherapy marketed as Temodar and made by the US-based Merck.
NMS CEO Hugues Dolgos tells Endpoints News that the deal came about as the biotech wanted to expand the possibilities of its candidate. “We had decided to license that product, that candidate to a company that can maximize the value of this asset, because we are too small to go for all the potential indications and combinations. And we wanted to have a company having a very complementary portfolio in the DDR (DNA damage response) space,” Dolgos added.
The drug candidate is currently in a Phase I dose-escalation trial, as per the entry on clinicaltrials.gov. That trial is slated to complete sometime next year.
Dolgos joined NMS earlier this year from Servier, where he was global head of oncology. Before Servier, he was at Merck KGaA as a VP in R&D strategy.
PARP, the enzyme family that helps repair DNA, is a target for multiple drugs on the market, including AstraZeneca’s Lynparza and GSK and Tesaro’s Zejula. However, some of those drugs are prone to dose-limiting toxicities — by virtue of also inhibiting PARP2. One newer UK player, Duke Street Bio, has been looking at going after PARP1 and PARP7 — hoping to create a drug that is more selective and therefore, safer and more efficacious.
They sold their last biotech to Merck. Now they're back with a PARP outfit named after a London street
Victoria Zazulina
“The partnership with Nerviano started from our joint discovery collaboration on novel DDR targets and this innovative science is a great fit with our early pipeline and our ambition to bring more treatment options to patients with cancer,” Victoria Zazulina, head of development unit oncology for Merck KGaA’s healthcare business, told Endpoints in a statement.
Merck KGaA will pay NMNerviano$65 million in upfront and option fees, plus there are undisclosed milestone payments and tiered royalties based on sales. If the option is exercised, Merck KGaA gets exclusive rights to the drug in R&Dcancerfacturing and commercialization. The two companies will collMerck KGaA NMS-293’s clinical development, with NMS responsible for designing, sponsoring, conducting, and funding global clinical trials.
Merck KGaAed that the company, in its current iteration, started out as a Pfizer spinout in 2004. Headquartered in Italy outside of Milan, Nerviano Medical Sciences is a subsidiary Merck KGaAup — a group of several companies with an emphasis on oncology drug discovery, preclinical research, clinical developmNMS-293 manufacturing. NMS has developed other drugs that had been out-licensed, such as entrectinib, the ROS1 inhibitor that was licensed to Ignyta after NMS developed it and took it into Phase I.
Roche then bought out Ignyta for $1.7 billion in 2017, bringing the inhibiPfizerto its portfolio.Nerviano Medical SciencesNMS GroupNMSentrectinibROS1NMS
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