September 18, 2014
By Krystle Vermes, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Boehringer Ingelheim and CureVac announced today that they have entered an exclusive global license and development partnership to focus on CureVac’s CV9202, netting CureVac $556 million ($45 million upfront).
As part of the deal, CureVac will receive milestone payments and royalties on sales.
CV9202 is an investigational therapeutic mRNA vaccine in early clinical development for the treatment of lung cancer. This collaboration fits into Boehringer Ingelheim’s mission to focus on cancer therapies through novel treatment options with high therapeutic value.
“At Boehringer Ingelheim we are proud of our commitment to help improve the treatment of cancers with a high medical need,” said Klaus Dugi, chief medical officer, Boehringer Ingelheim.
“In our collaboration with CureVac, we will investigate combining existing treatments with the approach of sustained activation of the immune system,” he said. “With this we hope to be able to develop new treatments and further expand our broad pipeline in lung cancer.”
Boehringer Ingelheim will start investigating CV9202 in two different lung cancer settings: in combination with afatinib in patients with advanced or metastatic epidermal growth factor receptor mutated non-small cell lung cancer, and in combination with chemo-radiation therapy in patients with unresectable stage III NSCLC.
In 2011, Diovan alone generated $5.7 billion worldwide.
“This collaboration is extremely relevant for CureVac because, as a biotech enterprise, we rely on collaboration with strong partners for the clinical development and commercialization of our compounds,” said Ingmar Hoerr, co-founder and CEO of CureVac GmbH.
“Cancer immunotherapy represents one of the biggest innovations in cancer treatment of recent times and we are delighted to now be working with Boehringer Ingelheim,” said Hoerr. “The out-licensing and clinical development of our promising therapeutic vaccine CV9202 represents the logical next step in developing this novel treatment for cancer patients, and the significant commitment from Boehringer Ingelheim underscores the relevance of the mRNA technology.”
CV9202 is a combination of mRNA molecules coding for six antigens overexpressed in lung cancer, designed to spawn an immune system response against the tumor. In initial clinical trials, CV9202 showed that it could generate immune responses against all anti-tumor antigens.
CureVac, which is based in Germany, is a pioneer in the field of mRNA-based technology platforms. The company has been developing mRNA-based cancer immunotherapies since 2000.
Boehringer Ingelheim is one of the world’s 20 leading pharmaceutical companies. Since it was founded in 1885, the company has been focused on researching, developing and manufacturing medications of high therapeutic value for human and veterinary medicine.
