Repare Therapeutics Inc. (“Repare”), a precision oncology company pioneering synthetic lethality to develop novel therapeutics that target specific vulnerabilities of tumors in genetically defined patient populations, announced it has entered into an exclusive, worldwide research collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS).
“This collaboration will help to ensure that our novel discoveries are being broadly prosecuted in the search for the next generation of precision oncology medicines,” said Lloyd M. Segal, President and Chief Executive Officer of Repare Therapeutics. “Bristol Myers Squibb brings key strategic capabilities to this partnership and the resources to maximize our platform’s potential while allowing us to independently focus on our proprietary clinical and near-clinical programs.”
“We look forward to collaborating with Repare and to applying their SNIPRx technology to enable the identification of novel precision oncology therapeutics,” said Rupert Vessey, M.A., B.M., B.Ch., F.R.C.P., D.Phil., Executive Vice President, Research & Early Development, Bristol Myers Squibb. “Repare’s distinctive team and technology have the potential to lead to the discovery of important targeted drug candidates that can result in new precision therapies for patients.”
Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will leverage Repare’s proprietary, CRISPR-enabled genome-wide synthetic lethal target discovery platform, SNIPRx, to jointly identify multiple synthetic lethal precision oncology targets for drug candidates. Repare will grant BMS exclusive worldwide rights to develop and commercialize therapeutics for select validated synthetic lethal precision oncology targets discovered under the collaboration.
As part of the agreement, BMS will make an upfront payment of $65 million which includes a $15 million equity investment in Repare. Repare will be eligible to receive up to approximately $3 billion in license fees, discovery, development, regulatory and sales-based milestones, in addition to royalty payments on net sales of each product commercialized by BMS.