AbbVie and Calico to collaborate on age-related disease research

AbbVie has announced a new collaboration with Calico to discover, develop and bring to market new therapies for patients with age-related diseases, such as neurodegeneration and cancer.

Calico, a Google-backed life sciences company, will use its scientific expertise to establish a world-class research and development facility in San Francisco, with AbbVie providing scientific and clinical development support and commercial expertise.

The companies will each initially provide up to $250 million (153.24 million pounds) to fund the collaboration with the potential for both sides to contribute an additional $500 million, while both parties will share costs and profits equally.

Calico will be responsible for research and early development during the first five years and will continue to advance collaboration projects through to phase IIa for a ten-year period. AbbVie will support this work and retains an option to manage late-stage development and commercial activities.

Richard Gonzalez, chairman of the board and chief executive officer at AbbVie, said: "This collaboration demonstrates our commitment to exploring new areas of medicine and innovative approaches to drug discovery and development that augments our already robust pipeline."

This comes after the company recently announced a new collaboration with Infinity Pharmaceuticals centring on the development of the investigational cancer therapy duvelisib.