Integrin therapies sees R&D collaboration

Janssen and Morphic Therapeutic have entered into a research and development collaboration to discover and develop novel integrin therapeutics. They will focus on several undisclosed integrin targets, explore both inhibitors and activators of integrin function, and expand therapeutic potential of the Morphic pipeline. Morphic will receive multiple preclinical development, clinical and commercial milestone payments from Janssen of more than $725 million if they met. Janssen will be responsible for global clinical development and commercialisation of licensed compounds, paying Morphic an upfront payment and funding research.
President and CEO of Morphic Therapeutic, Praveen Tipirneni, said: “Our team is pleased to have a partner of Janssen’s calibre join our network of collaborators working together to drive the development of a new generation of oral integrin medicines using our in-house platform. The dysregulation of the diverse integrin family is implicated in many conditions, creating an urgency which drives our team’s mission to rapidly and systematically interrogate this target class both from an inhibition and activation perspective. This partnership offers exciting opportunities to advance oral integrin development into new areas of research which creates value for all our internal programs and accelerates the refinement and validation of our platform.”