Pfizer is opening up another road to the obesity market, announcing a partnership with one of Flagship Pioneering’s startups to identify new molecules and targets for the condition.
The partnership will have ProFound Therapeutics look for proteins that could either be drugs or targets for the treatment of obesity, and then the companies will have the option to develop them further.
ProFound CEO John Lepore said they’ll specifically be looking for “new target space beyond what’s known.”
John Lepore“We haven’t disclosed yet what the mechanistic direction and focus is going to be. But our platform is particularly designed to go after novel mechanisms that aren’t addressed by current targets,” Lepore said in an interview with Endpoints News. He said it’s too early to give any details about timeline goals for the effort, and he declined to disclose the financial terms.
The arrangement is the first partnership to come from a deal between Flagship and Pfizer under which both sides put in $50 million to develop drug programs out of Flagship’s biotech startups.
Pfizer has three obesity drugs in its pipeline, but is looking for more. The most advanced, danuglipron, is being tested as a once-a-day oral treatment after a Phase 2 trial last year had high rates of patients who quit because of side effects as a twice-a-day treatment. The once-daily version is in Phase 1, as is the Nxera Pharma-partnered PF-06954522, which also targets GLP-1. And Pfizer has a Phase 1 trial for PF-07976016, a small molecule drug that a spokesperson described as a next-generation treatment with an undisclosed mechanism of action.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has repeatedly said the company intends to get into obesity, given the size of the market and the pharma company’s pedigree in the primary care and cardiometabolic space.
“We are looking at all of them, and having our own efforts,” Bourla said at an investment conference earlier this week hosted by Goldman Sachs. He made clear the New York drugmaker doesn’t intend to do a major deal, but would look at an asset-based transaction to bring a molecule in-house.
ProFound came out of stealth in 2022 with $75 million in funding, announcing that it was using the growing science of proteomics to identify thousands upon thousands of previously unknown proteins that could be future drugs or targets. Lepore is a cardiologist who joined the company as CEO after a long tenure at GSK.
Editor’s note: An error about the stage of one of Pfizer’s danuglipron trials has been corrected.