GSK and Flagship Pioneering will jointly pay up to $150 million to kick-start a respiratory and immunology tie-up.
The pair will create new vaccines and medicines based on work out of Flagship’s 40-plus biotech companies, the duo said Monday morning. Flagship and its sprawling lineup of companies have inked large pharma pacts in recent quarters with Pfizer and Novo Nordisk. Flagship is fresh off its $3.6 billion funding haul.
Flagship CEO Noubar Afeyan recently told Endpoints News that pharma partnerships were becoming increasingly important for the firm, which has founded more than 100 companies, including Moderna.
Paul Biondi“We really see this as the new model for us,” Paul Biondi, president of Flagship’s Pioneering Medicines, said in an interview. He said more pharma partnerships are likely.
The London-based pharma giant could dish out up to $720 million to Flagship and its apparatus of biotech spinouts in upfront, development and commercial milestones, on top of undefined preclinical funding and tiered royalties.
That payout potential is for each of up to 10 new medicines and vaccines that GSK could snag the exclusive option to under the agreement. That means GSK could ultimately be on the hook to dole out $7.2 billion if everything goes to plan.
The duo is working to hash out which specific diseases GSK wants to direct the partnership toward.
“We started some dialogues already and we’d like to move quickly,” Biondi said. “I would imagine over the next year, we will be starting to announce some specific programs where we’ve matched up one of our bioplatform companies to an area that GSK would like to explore and ultimately hopefully develop a medicine together.”
GSK bought a respiratory-focused biotech earlier this year, paying up to $1.4 billion for early-stage asthma drug developer Aiolos Bio, and spent $2 billion to snap up chronic cough drug developer Bellus Health last year. The company is also competing in the RSV market with one of the first vaccines for the respiratory virus. Immunology, meanwhile, has been one of the hottest areas for biopharma dealmaking and venture investment in recent quarters.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include details from an interview with Flagship’s Paul Biondi.