Evotec SE, a life science company with a unique business model that delivers on its mission to discover and develop highly effective therapeutics and make them available to the patients, announced further significant progress of the company's strategic research collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb relating to building a high value molecular glue-based pipeline for unmet medical needs.
Key scientific achievements expand the pipeline of high value molecular glue degraders for unmet medical needs. Performance-based and program-based achievements trigger payments of in total US$ 75 million to Evotec.
Initiated in 2018, the collaboration combines Evotec's high-performance multi-omics screening as well as AI-supported data analytics and drug design capabilities with Bristol Myers Squibb's industry-leading library of cereblon E3 ligase modulators (CELMoDs).
The collaboration, expanded in 2022, continues to deliver on its goal to identify novel molecular glue degraders for high-value targets in the field of oncology and beyond. The performance-based and program-based achievements further strengthen Evotec's joint programme pipeline.
Dr Cord Dohrmann, chief scientific officer of Evotec, commented: ""We are proud to see this continued expansion of our molecular glue degrader pipeline together with Bristol Myers Squibb who is leading the industry in this field emphasizing the value of our systematic and industrialized PanOmics-based approach. Our growing pipeline of molecular degraders addressing a broad panel of high value targets harbors an enormous potential to deliver multiple first-in-class products into the market. We are well on track to deliver on our plans.""
Conventional small molecule therapeutics work via a drug-induced interference with a protein activity. This limitation to agonistic or antagonistic functions renders about 90 per cent of proteins ""undruggable"". Also, conventional small molecules only work while they are actively binding to the receptor, which typically requires a treatment regimen consisting of one or even several carefully dosed medications every day.
Molecular glue degraders are compounds that induce interactions between an E3 ubiquitin ligase and a molecular target. The induced interaction results in ubiquitination and subsequent degradation of the recruited protein. Through this mechanism of action molecular glues are not restricted to the agonistic/antagonistic features of a protein, thus massively expanding the range of the druggable proteome. Also, the molecular glue itself is not degraded in the process and can trigger the degradation process several times over, thus leading to longer-lasting therapeutic effects.
In 2018, Evotec entered a long-term strategic drug discovery and development collaboration in the field of molecular glues with Celgene, now Bristol Myers Squibb. Bristol Myers Squibb is a leader in this field based on its unique library of cereblon E3 ligase modulators. The aim of this strategic alliance is to discover and develop a leading pipeline of molecular glue degraders for a range of therapeutic indications leveraging all of Evotec's proprietary PanOmics and PanHunter platforms as well as AI/ML-based drug discovery and development capabilities.
Evotec applies high-end proteomics and transcriptomics at industrial scale to profile and select promising drug candidates based on comprehensive cell biological profiles. Evotec's leading PanOmics screening capabilities are delivering unmatched throughput. The selection of the most promising candidates for drug development is facilitated by Evotec's PanOmics data analysis platform PanHunter. PanHunter supports the integration and analysis of these data sets and thereby enables the selection of the most promising CELMoDs for further progression into lead optimization.
Evotec announced in May of 2022 that the company has further extended and expanded its collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb for another 8 years as the initial collaboration proved to be highly productive in generating a promising pipeline of molecular glue degraders.