September 17, 2014
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
French healthcare behemoth Sanofi (SNY) will partner with privately-held biogen firm MyoKardia on a $200 million initiative to develop new therapies to help treat deadly genetic heart muscle disease, the companies said today in a statement.
The partnership will be an offshoot of Paris-based Sanofi’s early-stage investment program, Sunrise, and will encompass three MyoKardia programs. Two will be focused on hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and the other is focused on dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM).
HCM is the leading cause of sudden cardiac death in young adults, and DCM the leading genetic illness requiring heart transplantation. Together are believed to affect nearly 800,000 children and adults in the U.S. alone, said Sanofi.
“By genetically defining HCM and DCM into several underlying rare genetic diseases, MyoKardia’s candidate therapies have the potential to be developed far more efficiently than traditional cardiovascular drugs,” said Tassos Gianakakos, chief executive officer for MyoKardia.
Funding will take the form of $200 million in equity investments, milestone payments and research and development services through 2018. So far $45 million has already been received in an upfront licensing fee and an initial equity investment.
San Francisco-based MyoKardia was launched by venture capital shop Third Rock Ventures in 2012 with the aim of making genetically targeted drugs for certain forms of heart disease.
The two firms will share development costs on the programs following initial demonstration of efficacy in patients, with Sanofi fully covering the development costs of any eventual DCM program.
“This collaboration illustrates Sanofi’s research and development philosophy for Sunrise project,” said Elias Zerhouni, president of global research and development for Sanofi. “It combines in a meaningful way the unique expertise in rare and cardiovascular diseases of our top scientists with that of the best innovators in the world, like MyoKardia’s founders and scientists, to achieve real breakthroughs in medicine.”
