The Muna partnership will give GSK access to Muna’s MiND-MAP platform, which it will apply to postmortem brain samples to identify potential therapeutic targets for Alzheimer’s disease.
GSK has been on a dealmaking spree this week, unveiling its third agreement on Thursday—this time with Danish biotech Muna Therapeutics. According to the announcement, GSK struck the deal to advance novel therapies and uncover new treatment pathways for Alzheimer’s disease.
The new collaboration continues GSK’s increasing foray into the neuro space and follows its potential $650 million deal with Flagship venture Vesalius last month, which will see the companies develop novel therapies for Parkinson’s disease and a yet-undisclosed neurodegenerative target.
Under the terms of the Muna partnership, GSK will make an upfront payment of around €33.5 million ($35 million) and will put up to €140 million ($147.6 million) per target on the line in milestones. Meanwhile, Muna will be entitled to tiered royalties on net sales of any product under the partnership that reaches commercialization.
The companies did not specify the number of targets under the partnership, only disclosing that GSK will have the opportunity to consider “multiple, high-value, validated” targets related to Alzheimer’s disease. Muna will be responsible for identifying and validating these targets, after which GSK will take charge of drug development, including preclinical and clinical studies, regulatory activities, manufacturing and commercialization.
The centerpiece of Thursday’s deal is Muna’s proprietary MiND-MAP platform, which the biotech on its website calls an “all-in-human target discovery and validation approach.” MiND-MAP makes use of single-cell spatial multi-omics and bioinformatics techniques to identify genetic, cellular and other molecular mechanisms linked to a specific disease—or to some people’s resilience to it.
With its extensive structural biology and computational chemistry expertise, Muna can then zero in on potentially disease-causing proteins with novel small molecule drugs. GSK and Muna plan to leverage this approach using postmortem human brain samples to identify promising new therapeutic targets for Alzheimer’s disease.
“By applying spatial multi-omics to unique patient phenotypes, Muna’s MiND-MAP platform is able to determine the genetic and cellular basis of progression and resilience in neurodegenerative diseases,” Kaivan Khavandi, GSK’s senior vice president and global head of respiratory/immunology R&D, said in a statement. Thursday’s agreement will help the pharma “bring desperately needed new therapeutic solutions in Alzheimer’s disease.”
The Muna partnership is GSK’s third deal inked this week. On Wednesday, the pharma bet more than $1 billion in an agreement with DualityBio, granting it an exclusive option to license the Chinese biotech’s potentially best-in-class antibody-drug conjugate for an undisclosed gastrointestinal cancer target.
Additionally, GSK also on Thursday extended its original agreement with Chongqing Zhifei Biological Products, giving the Chinese firm eight more years of exclusive rights to import, distribute and co-promote the pharma’s shingles vaccine Shingrix in China.
