Evotec and Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) have entered into an exclusive global licence agreement, extending their neuroscience partnership.
The agreement covers selected late-stage discovery programmes that were developed and progressed within the collaboration between the two companies.
Evotec and BMS originally entered their neurodegeneration partnership in 2016.
The initial partnership generated a promising pipeline of discovery to clinical-stage programmes. Based on this, BMS and Evotec extended and expanded the partnership for an additional eight years in March.
Under the licence agreement, BMS has selected an undisclosed number of programmes that were rapidly developed and progressed using Evotec’s precision medicine platforms for further development within the expanded collaboration.
Evotec receives a $40m payment and is eligible to earn performance milestone payments, as well as tiered royalties up to low double-digit percentages on product sales.
Dr Cord Dohrmann, Chief Scientific Officer of Evotec, commented: “This licence agreement will further bolster our joint pipeline of programmes targeting several neurodegenerative conditions. We are confident that the strong collaboration of the experienced teams at Evotec and BMS will make novel innovative treatment options available to patients living with a broad range of neurodegenerative conditions.”
Evotec and BMS aim to identify disease-modifying treatments for a broad range of neurodegenerative diseases. There is a significant unmet medical need for therapies that slow down or reverse disease progression in the field of neurodegenerative diseases.
The partnership has already been successful in generating a pipeline of discovery and pre-clinical-stage programmes. A first programme, BMS-986419 or EVT8683, targeting eIF2b, was in-licensed by BMS in September 2021, following the successful filing of an IND application with the FDA and has proceeded into clinical Phase I trials.
