December 22, 2014
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
Drug discovery and research company Phylogica Ltd got an early Christmas present Monday, when it said it superstar biotech Genentech will pay it $142 million to collaborate on a research and licensing agreement to discover novel antibiotics.
The Australian company, based in Perth, said it will get an upfront payment of $500,000 followed by research, development, and commercialization milestone payments totaling up to $142 million.
Phylogica was launched in 2005 as a spin out from the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research (Perth, Australia) and the Fox Chase Cancer Center. It hires out its Phylomer(r) libraries and proprietary screening technologies to larger biopharmaceutical and biotech firms looking to find new ways to approach therapeutics.
Company executives were understandably excited about the new partnership with the Roche Group subsidiary.
“We are delighted to continue building upon on the success of our initial collaboration with Genentech,” said Phylogica‘s Chief Executive Officer Richard Hopkins in a statement. “This alliance has the potential to address an unmet need for novel antimicrobials to treat bacterial infections, including drug-resistant superbugs.”
Phylogica uses libraries containing over 400 billion unique natural peptides, which have been optimized by evolutionary selection to adopt stable drug-like structures. It catalogues its drug discovery platform by “harnessing the rich biodiversity of nature” to discover novel peptide therapeutics from the most structurally diverse libraries available.
Neither Genentech nor Roche issued any comment on the deal Monday.
