Amphista Therapeutics, a spin-out company from the University of Dundee, has signed collaboration agreements with two major global pharmaceutical companies that together could be worth more than $2 billion (£1.6bn).
The separate partnerships with Merck Healthcare and Bristol Myers Squibb come less than two months after Amphista completed the largest fundraising so far this year in Scotland's life sciences sector. That £38 million investment was co-led by Forbion and Gilde Healthcare, with additional investors including the Novartis Venture Fund and Eli Lilly.
Set up in October 2019, Amphista’s technology uses the body’s natural processes to selectively degrade and remove disease-causing proteins from human cells. The company’s targeted protein degradation (TPD) platform is expected to lead to the creation of new drugs for a broad range of diseases that are currently difficult to treat, with the initial focus on problematic cancer tumours.
Merck and Amphista will work to discover and develop small molecule protein degraders for an initial three targets in oncology and immunology. Amphista will receive an upfront payment and R&D funding of up to $44m (£35m), with success-based milestone payments of up to $1bn (£800m).
Amphista will also receive an upfront payment of $30m (£24m) from Bristol Myers Squibb, with potential additional payments of up to $1.2bn (£1bn). Bristol Myers Squibb will be granted a global exclusive license to the degraders developed as part of the collaboration and will be responsible for further development and commercialisation activities.
READ MORE: Healthcare drives surge of investment in smaller Scottish firms
In addition to treating cancer, the company’s technology is expected to prove useful in neurological and neurodegenerative conditions, immunology and other areas requiring drug delivery through the central nervous system. The company's technology is based on the work of professor Alessio Ciulli at the university’s School of Life Sciences.
Nicola Thompson, chief executive of Amphista, said: “We are extremely pleased to enter into these collaborations, which are a validation of the progress we have made in TPD research and the potential of our EclipsysTM next-generation TPD platform.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here