Evotec gets USD 5 m milestone payment from Bristol Myers Squibb
Hamburg: Evotec SE has announced that it has received a USD 5 m milestone payment from Bristol Myers Squibb, following the acceptance of an Investigational New Drug (“IND”) application by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) in their strategic protein degradation partnership.
The drug candidate, a cereblon E3 ligase modulator (“CELMoD”) was developed under the collaboration, and a Phase 1 clinical trial is expected to begin in 2026.
Initiated in 2018, the collaboration combines Evotec’s high-performance multi-omics screening as well as AI-supported data analytics and drug design capabilities with Bristol Myers Squibb’s industry-leading library of CELMoDs.
The collaboration, expanded in 2022, continues to deliver on its goal to identify novel molecular glue degraders for high-value targets in the field of oncology and beyond.
Dr Cord Dohrmann, Chief Scientific Officer of Evotec, commented: “We are excited to have reached this important achievement in our collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb, and to move one step closer to bringing the first compound of our molecular glue degrader pipeline to the clinic. This IND acceptance represents not only a major scientific and regulatory milestone but also validates the strength of our collaboration and emphasizes the enormous potential for delivering multiple first-in-class products to market.“
Conventional small molecule therapeutics work via a drug-induced interference with a protein activity. This limitation to agonistic or antagonistic functions renders about 90% of proteins “undruggable”. Also, conventional small molecules only work while they are actively binding to the receptor, which typically requires a treatment regimen consisting of one or even several carefully dosed medications every day.
Molecular glue degraders are compounds that induce interactions between an E3 ubiquitin ligase and a molecular target. The induced interaction results in ubiquitination and subsequent degradation of the recruited protein. Through this mechanism of action molecular glues are not restricted to the agonistic/antagonistic features of a protein, thus massively expanding the range of the druggable proteome. Also, the molecular glue itself is not degraded in the process and can trigger the degradation process several times over, thus leading to longer-lasting therapeutic effects.
