Just four months after Eli Lilly and British biotech Alchemab penned a discovery collaboration, the Big Pharma is licensing its first drug asset from the deal.
Lilly will pay up to $415 million in an unspecified combination of upfront, discovery milestones and royalties for ATLX-1282, Alchemab's first-in-class preclinical program for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), as well as for “other neurodegenerative conditions,” according to a Tuesday morning release.
Under the pact, Cambridge, England-based Alchemab will take the program through early phase 1 tests, then Lilly will step in to lead all further development and sales activities.
Alchemab, an AI and machine learning biotech, taps tech giant Nvidia's so-called supercomputer in Cambridge to help it find new targets and antibodies.
This is the first drug licensed from the January 2025 collaboration pact between the two companies, which focused on ALS research. Under the terms of that deal, Alchemab and Lilly agreed to work on up to five new antibodies. ATLX-1282 will be the first.
ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, causes progressive degeneration of nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain and ultimately proves fatal. There were few treatments for the condition for many years, but over the past decade, there has been an uptick in research and new drugs.
This includes most recently Biogen and Ionis’ Qalsody that nabbed an FDA green light in 2023 for ALS patients with a mutation in the SOD1 gene.
There had also been a new drug in Amylyx Pharmaceuticals’ Relyvrio, but this was pulled off the market a year ago after it failed to move the needle in a confirmatory trial.
And to prove just how tough ALS R&D can be, investigational ALS treatments from AbbVie-Calico and Denali both failed to slow disease progression in phase 2/3 trials at the start of the year.
That came a month after Corcept’s cortisol modulator was also unable to slow ALS progression in a midstage study.