Tavros Therapeutics has teamed up with biopharma Vividion Therapeutics – a wholly owned and independently operated subsidiary of Bayer AG – in a collaboration agreement to discover or target four oncology targets across an initial five-year term.
As a precision oncology platform company, Tavros leverages its functional and computational genomics technologies to reveal unique vulnerabilities within tumours to discover novel targets and biomarkers in areas of high unmet clinical need, while identifying novel clinical positioning strategies for existing molecules.
Tavros chief executive officer and co-founder Eoin McDonnell commented: “The future of cancer treatment lies in the precision targeting of therapies in the optimal clinical settings. This partnership allows Tavros to expand the actionability of our platform into a new target space by pairing our precision oncology platform with Vividion’s unmatched ability to drug the traditionally undruggable.
“We’re thrilled to launch our work with Vividion and harness our combined expertise to reach patients with difficult-to-treat cancers by uncovering and drugging the next generation of high-value targets and augmenting the efficacy of emerging compounds.”
According to the conditions of the agreement, Tavros is set to receive an upfront cash payment of $17.5m from Vividion, and is eligible to receive up to $430.5m in potential future payments contingent on the achievement of prespecified preclinical, clinical development and commercial milestones, on top of low-single-digit royalties on sales of certain potential programmes.
Vividion has options to pursue up to five additional targets with up to $482m in potential additional future payments.
“Despite decades of effort, many targets remain inaccessible to traditional small molecule drugs, and many others have uncertain relevance to disease,” said Vividion chief executive officer Jeffrey Hatfield.
He added: “This collaboration brings together two orthogonal, highly innovative and synergistic approaches to drug discovery that will address both of these challenges. Vividion has the ability to find and drug previously unknown, or cryptic, functional binding pockets on oncology and immunology targets of high interest, while Tavros has the potential to uncover previously unknown synthetic vulnerabilities or dependencies in deadly tumour cells. We believe this powerful combination of leading-edge technologies has the potential to deliver multiple breakthrough discoveries for cancer patients in need.”