Our Vision In Action

In addition to launching multiple wholly-owned discovery programs, we have teamed up with venture capitalists, leading academics, and biopharma companies around the globe to establish research collaborations and co-found startups. We currently have over 25 collaborative programs with more than 10 companies, including a number of companies we co-founded. 

Some of the companies we currently collaborate with include Ajax Therapeutics, Bright Angel Therapeutics, Faxian Therapeutics, Morphic Holding, Nimbus Therapeutics, Ono Pharmaceutical, Petra Pharma, Sanofi, ShouTi , Sun Pharma Advanced Research Company (SPARC)  and TB Alliance. These programs are being advanced by our collaborators in a number of therapeutic areas, including oncology, antifungals, fibrosis, inflammatory bowel disease, metabolic disease, autoimmune disease, immuno-oncology, cardiopulmonary disease and tuberculosis. In addition to these programs, we also have a collaboration with Takeda under which we are advancing programs in oncology and neurodegenerative disease. Unlike our other collaborative programs, which are owned and progressed by our respective collaborators, under the Takeda collaboration, we retain all intellectual property rights to any product candidates that are discovered until Takeda exercises its option to acquire a program at either the lead optimization stage or development candidate stage.

The results of these collaborations speak for themselves: two novel drugs have been approved by the FDA and several more are in clinical studies. Our collaboration with Nimbus, which we co-founded in 2009, is an example of the strength of our collaboration strategy and the power of our computational platform. Based on structural insights related to a novel allosteric binding site and our computational assays, Nimbus, in collaboration with us, was able to identify a unique series of acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC) allosteric protein-protein interaction inhibitors with favorable pharmaceutical properties that inhibit the activity of the ACC enzyme. Nimbus achieved proof of concept in a Phase 1b clinical trial of its ACC inhibitor. In 2016, Nimbus sold the program to Gilead Sciences, Inc. in a transaction valued at approximately $1.2 billion. In addition, Morphic, in collaboration with us, was able to design an oral inhibitor of the integrin α₄β₇, which is an established target with an approved antibody for the treatment of autoimmune diseases. Morphic became a publicly-traded company in June 2019 and has stated it expects to file an IND for this program by the middle of 2020.