EQRx, a new type of pharmaceutical company committed to developing and delivering important new medicines to patients at radically lower prices, and Evotec SE, a leading life science company, announced a collaboration to design, discover and develop new therapeutic options for patients. The collaboration will help accelerate EQRx’s pipeline expansion efforts by leveraging Evotec’s unique data-driven, fully integrated R&D platform, applied across different drug modalities and therapeutic areas. This approach aims to expedite the invention and development of novel drugs and helps ensure superior translation from research ideas to safe and efficacious medicines.
The collaboration will focus on multiple therapeutic targets in oncology and immunology. Under the terms of the agreement, EQRx and Evotec will collaborate on drug discovery, pre-clinical and clinical development. Evotec will lead drug discovery and pre-clinical development efforts, and EQRx will be responsible for clinical development, regulatory and commercialization efforts. In addition to jointly funded research and development activities, Evotec will benefit from the potential commercial success of the assets developed within the partnership through a variable profit share mechanism.
“We continue to rapidly expand our early-stage development pipeline through access to innovative, next-generation drug discovery and engineering technologies,” said Carlos Garcia-Echeverria, Ph.D., chief of Rx creation at EQRx. “This collaboration with Evotec will enable us to engineer and develop precision medicines in immunology and oncology with high quality and speed of execution. We look forward to a productive collaboration to bring innovative, affordable and accessible treatment options to people in need.”
“EQRx’s ambitious and transformative mission to deliver important new therapies to patients at more affordable prices makes them an ideal partner for us,” commented Dr. Craig Johnstone, chief operating officer of Evotec. “This exciting new partnership will expand the reach of our unique data-driven integrated R&D platform. We look forward to leveraging our combined knowledge, expertise and leading-edge technologies to advance new medicines against validated targets as rapidly as possible to make the biggest possible impact for patients.”