The first agreement under Pfizer and Flagship Pioneering’s strategic partnership has been initiated, with Flagship and Profound Therapeutics announcing an agreement to identify potential first-in-class therapies to treat obesity.
Pfizer and Flagship first
announced
their collaboration worth $7bn in 2023 to accelerate the development of innovative medicines.
As part of the agreement, Pfizer and Flagship aim to invest in and develop a new pipeline of up to ten programmes for areas including internal medicine, oncology, infectious diseases and immunology.
Under the new collaboration, ProFound will leverage its proprietary ProFoundry Platform in partnership with Pioneering Medicine’s drug development expertise to discover novel proteins and evaluate their therapeutic relevance to treat obesity.
After validation, Pfizer will have the option to advance selected research programmes under the terms of the strategic partnership with Flagship.
Expected to impact 1.9 billion people globally by 2035, obesity-related conditions such as heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer are among the leading causes of preventable, premature death, according to federal data.
The ProFoundry Platform works by using state-of-the-art protein detection technologies to systematically identify and validate proteins and determine their therapeutic potential, developing a database of tens of thousands of novel proteins, including their connectivity, functionality and roles in health and disease.
Charlotte Allerton, head of discovery and early development, Pfizer, commented: “This agreement… is designed to push the boundaries of science to potentially unlock new protein therapeutics for obesity… that may lead to new, first-in-class therapies [to] help address [the] current gaps in care.”
Paul Biondi, executive partner, Flagship and president, Pioneering Medicines, said: “This agreement will enable ProFound to explore how its pioneering platform can tackle unmet needs in obesity [and]… is an exciting milestone for the partnership and the pipeline of programmes we are developing to deliver potential new and transformational medicines.”
In January, Novo Nordisk
announced
two research collaborations with Omega Therapeutics and Cellarity to develop novel treatment approaches for cardiometabolic diseases under the existing framework of the
previously announced
partnership between Novo Nordisk and Flagship to create a portfolio of novel research programmes for the development of transformational medicines.