Novartis and Antares Therapeutics are shooting for the stars, launching a joint mission to develop small molecule oncology therapies.
Novartis is paying $105 million cash and offering Antares up to $1.8 billion in potential milestones to team up with Antares Therapeutics in hopes of ultimately creating new precision medicines for hard-to-treat cancers.
Scorpion Therapeutics spinout Antares will use its discovery engine to lead all research activities, according to details of the deal announced Wednesday. Antares will focus on multiple historically undruggable targets, giving Novartis the option of exercising rights to advance the program forward.
The preclinical biotech will also work to bolster its discovery engine, which combines covalent drug design, chemical proteomics, structure‑driven computation and machine learning for small molecule discovery and development, according to the release.
Novartis isn’t the first partner to fall into Antares’ orbit. The Boston biotech emerged last year with $177 million and three of Scorpion’s preclinical precision medicine assets after Eli Lilly snapped up the company’s lead PI3Kα program. At the time, Scorpion was led by Adam Friedman, who transitioned over to helm the spinout. To date, Antares touts partnerships with AstraZeneca, which was inked with Scorpion, and Pierre Fabre Laboratories, which acquired two Scorpion assets.
Antares’ own lead program is a cancer candidate expected to launch into human trials sometime this year, according to the company.
“From the outset, our goal has been to build a discovery engine that systematically unlocks high-value, challenging targets and delivers first-in-class precision medicines,” Antares CEO Friedman said in a prepared statement. “This collaboration lets us scale that engine alongside Novartis’ world-class development capabilities and global reach, so we can translate our science into transformative therapies for patients faster than either of us could alone.”
Oncology is one of Novartis’ areas of strategic focus, with the Antares pact building on a March deal to acquire Synnovation Therapeutics’ pan-mutant‑selective PI3Kα inhibitor for $2 billion upfront.
“Many of the most compelling targets today in oncology have historically been considered undruggable,” Novartis’ President of Biomedical Research Fiona Marshall said in the Wednesday release. “We believe this collaboration has the potential to unlock a new wave of targeted therapies and bring meaningful advances to patients.”
This year has seen a return to form for industry M&A, with biopharma spending nearly $47 billion in acquisitions across 19 deals in just the first quarter of 2026.
