Xynomic Pharmaceuticals, a pharma company with roots in both the U.S. and China, forged a deal worth up to $800 million to acquire a Phase II ready cancer treatment from Germany-based Boehringer Ingelheim.
Xynomic Pharmaceuticals, a pharma company with roots in both the U.S. and China, forged a deal worth up to $800 million to acquire a Phase II-ready cancer treatment from Germany-based Boehringer Ingelheim International GmbH.
The deal covers BI 860585, a Phase II-ready potent and selective ATP-competitive mTOR serine/threonine kinase inhibitor. BI 860585 has already gone through a Phase I trial of 90 patients with advanced solid tumors where the drug was tested as both a single agent and in combination with chemotherapy. The Phase I data, Xynomic said, showed that BI 860585 was well-tolerated and the treatment achieved disease control rates that include partial response plus stable disease of 20 percent, 28 percent and 58 percent, respectively.
This morning, Xynomic said it intends to initiate Phase II clinical trials within the next nine months. One of the trials the company is planning will combine BI 860585 with a standard-of-care treatment against breast cancer. The other trial the company is planning is a phase 1b trial combining BI 860585 with Xynomic’s XP-102 against colorectal cancer. Xynomic acquired XP-102 from Boehringer Ingelheim in October 2017 in a deal worth more than $500 million.
Citing the World Health Organization, Xynomic pointed to the wide-spread cases of breast and colorectal cancer across the globe. As of September, the WHO said breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer death in women. Colorectal cancer men and the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in men, the WHO noted. Xynomic pointed to the potential indications as a probable driver of revenue for the company. Citing IMS and iHealthcareanalyst, drugs treating these two malignancies are expected to generate annual revenue of approximately $25.4 billion by 2023, the company said.
Few terms of the deal with Boehringer Ingelheim were disclosed, but Xynomic said total payments associated with the agreement will total up to $800 million and include an upfront payment, regulatory milestone payments and potential royalties.
The latest deal with Boehringer Ingelheim follows a June Series B financing round that provided the company with an undisclosed amount of funding to support eight clinical trials over the course of a year with four trials expected to be pivotal. The company initiated studies in renal cell carcinoma, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, melanoma and Lymphoma.
In addition to the financing in June, the company also launched its own R&D Innovation Center in Shanghai in May 2018 to discover and develop small molecule oncology drugs focused on kinase inhibition, immuno-oncology and epigenetic modification. The center is designed to have fully integrated in-house capabilities from lead identification to IND enabling studies. The first two molecules are XP-103, a TRK/Fra-1 inhibitor, and XP-104, a RET inhibitor.
