Bicycle Therapeutics’ novel approach to developing peptide drugs has produced several cancer clinical-stage drug candidates. Now Novartis wants to see if this technology can lead to better radiopharmaceuticals.
According to terms of a new partnership announced Tuesday, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant is paying $50 million up front to begin an R&D alliance. The research will focus on two oncology targets that were not disclosed.
The drugs of Cambridge, U.K.-based Bicycle Therapeutics are synthetic short peptides that are formed into two loops. Peptides can bind to target proteins only in certain folded states. Bicycle Therapeutics says the structure of its drugs, which resemble two bicycle wheels, stabilizes them and facilitates their binding to protein targets. The company adds that these therapies, which the company calls Bicycles, present a large surface area, enabling them to address targets undruggable by small molecules.
The Bicycle Therapeutic pipeline spans seven programs, five of which are Bicycles. Three internal Bicycle programs are in early or mid-stage clinical testing in cancer. One feature that Bicycle Therapeutics says could set its drugs apart is safety. The design of a Bicycle enables it to rapidly penetrate tissue to perform its therapeutic work. The therapy is then rapidly eliminated from the body via the kidneys, rather than being metabolized by the liver. By minimizing the liver’s exposure to the therapy, the company hopes to reduce the risk of liver toxicity.
Novartis’s portfolio includes the radiopharmaceuticals Lutathera, approved for certain gut cancers, and Pluvicto, approved last year for advanced prostate cancer. The new partnership aims to incorporate a radionucleotide in Bicycles, making what the companies are calling “Bicycle radio-conjugates,” or BRCs.
According to the agreement, Novartis will fund all preclinical and clinical development of the BRCs, as well as commercialization of these therapies if they win regulatory approval. Development and commercialization milestone payments could bring Bicycle Therapeutics up to $1.7 billion.
“We look forward to working closely with Novartis to pioneer the discovery and development of potential new cutting-edge radiopharmaceutical cancer treatments based on Bicycles,” Bicycle Therapeutics CEO Kevin Lee said in a prepared statement. “We believe the properties of Bicycles make them well suited for the development of precision-guided radiopharmaceuticals and represents the next leg in the application of our proprietary discovery platform in oncology.”
Photo by Flickr user Justin Jensen via a Creative Commons license
