Pfizer and Flagship Pioneering are turning to autoimmune disease as the sixth plank of their multibillion-dollar, 10-program partnership.
The agreement will see Flagship’s in-house drug developer unit Pioneering Medicines work with Pfizer to “discover compounds which may lead to the development of next-generation therapeutics for autoimmune diseases,” according to an April 1 release.
Pioneering Medicine has already been working with Charles River Laboratories and Valo Health’s Logica molecule designing platform. Last week, they announced that this effort had yielded its first drug candidate—a small molecule intended to treat lupus and other as yet unidentified autoimmune diseases.
It sounds like Pfizer and Flagship want to jump on this success, by tapping up the major contract research player that is Charles River and AI drug developer Valo Health, founded by Flagship back in 2019, to find more autoimmune candidates.
“Autoimmune diseases impose a substantial health burden on patients, and ongoing unmet need in the management of these conditions is driving a strong demand for more effective, safer and more personalized treatment options,” Paul Biondi, President of Pioneering Medicines, and a Managing Partner at Flagship Pioneering, said in this morning’s release.
“Through the power of our unique partnership model with Pfizer, we will leverage Logica to help address this gap with a promising novel approach to identifying disease-modifying candidate molecules that could positively impact the current treatment landscape for these complex and diverse conditions,” Biondi added.
Valo Health now marks the sixth collaboration for the $7 billion biobucks, 10-program collaboration between Pfizer and Flagship that was first announced in 2023. The general purpose of the programs covered by the wide-ranging partnership is to address unmet needs within Pfizer’s core strategic areas of interest. The Big Pharma can pluck partnerships from Flagship’s ecosystem that currently spans 40 companies.
Pfizer and Flagship picked obesity as the first target, perhaps not surprising given the major industry interest in the area, with the New York pharma giant working with Flagship’s ProFound Therapeutics to find new proteins and determine whether they can be used for new obesity therapeutics. They followed this up with a deal to use Quotient’s somatic genomics platform to discover new targets for two programs in cardiovascular and renal diseases, then obesity and lung cancer work with Ampersand and Montai, respectively.
Autoimmune diseases have also long proved major money spinners for pharma, with drugs on the market for conditions such as Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, arthritis and multiple sclerosis, to name but a few, making megablockbuster sales over the years.
“We are excited to bring the power of the Logica platform— powered by Valo and Charles River—to discover potential investigational therapies for patients suffering from autoimmune diseases,” Charles River’s Chief Scientific Officer Julie Frearson, Ph.D., said in this morning's release.
“Logica's proprietary AI small molecule drug discovery platform is revolutionizing the drug discovery process, and we look forward to working with the joint team at Pioneering Medicines and Pfizer to accelerate understanding of the molecular pathways involved in these diseases to develop more targeted and effective therapies for patients,” Frearson added.
No financial details of the latest collaboration were released.