Ongoing Collaboration Advances as FORMA Therapeutics Receives Licensing Payment and Additional Research Funding
WATERTOWN, Mass., July 9, 2013 – FORMA Therapeutics announced today the advancement of their tumor metabolism alliance with Janssen Biotech, Inc. from a research collaboration and option agreement to an executed license agreement.
“This expanded alliance with Janssen demonstrates FORMA’s ability to execute and deliver quality drug programs to our partners. As we now take a defined program through the next stages of development for Janssen, we will be leveraging additional innovative translational insights through our strategic partnership,” said Steven Tregay, Ph.D., President and CEO, FORMA Therapeutics. “This model has resulted in multiple high-quality drug programs for our partners.”
Under the terms of the initial agreement as announced in January 2012, FORMA was responsible for discovery and development of novel small molecule drug candidates against tumor metabolism targets. As part of Janssen’s election to execute a license agreement as granted in the original agreement, FORMA will receive additional undisclosed payments, as well as potential future milestones and royalties on each product.
“The scale and speed on which FORMA executes across broadly defined areas of biology is impressive. The collective excitement of FORMA and Translational Drug Development (TD2) teaming up with Janssen is shared by all of us here,” stated Daniel Von Hoff, M.D., F.A.C.P., Distinguished Professor and Physician-in-Chief, Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and TD2 Senior Investigator.
In addition, Janssen has expanded the initial collaboration with FORMA to include exploration into new targets.
“In order to better understand the interplay of targets within each of four areas (tumor metabolism, epigenetics, protein homeostasis and protein-protein interactions), FORMA initially selects 10 to 20 key targets in each area to examine and quickly creates novel drugs to drive a true chemical biology approach. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Janssen and leveraging capabilities from both groups to advance these programs,” stated Kenneth W. Bair, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Research and Development, FORMA Therapeutics.
