On 27 September, Ionis Pharmaceuticals announced that it has entered in a new collaboration agreement with the pharmaceutical company Roche for two early-stage programmes for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Huntington’s disease (HD). The new deal covers two undisclosed early-stage programmes for investigational RNA-targeting medicines. Under the terms of the partnership, Ionis will be responsible for progressing the two programmes through pre-clinical studies. Roche gains exclusive worldwide rights and will be responsible for clinical development, production and commercialisation activities of the medicines if they receive regulatory approval.
The alliance will leverage Ionis' expertise discovering medicines that target the root cause of the two central nervous system diseases and Roche's global experience developing and commercialising therapies for nervous system disorders. Ionis will receive a USD 60 million upfront payment from Roche and is eligible to receive development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments, and tiered royalties. This new agreement extends previous agreements over the past decade, starting with their collaboration in 2013 for tominersen, an Ionis-discovered investigational medicine for HD. Tominersen is currently being evaluated by Roche in a Phase II proof of concept study, named GENERATION HD2, in people with prodromal or early manifest HD.