Fledgling Forma inks $200M Novartis deal

When FierceBiotech talked with Forma Therapeutics CEO Steven Tregay last week, he made no secret of the fact that the fledgling biotech company was on the verge of executing a collaboration deal with a major pharma company. This morning Forma revealed that it had done a deal with Novartis, agreeing to use its chemistry platform to develop inhibitors for an undisclosed protein-protein interaction target in oncology.

The license and option pact is worth up to $200 million in upfront fees and milestones. As our profile this week [1] notes, Forma only recently dropped its stealth approach to announce that it had raised $25 million to pursue new compounds that could target pathways disclosed by the Cancer Genome Atlas Project. Its three founding scientists have played a key role in the field at the Broad Institute.

"Protein-protein interactions represent important target opportunities in the field of oncology drug discovery, but have been highly elusive to date," said Reinhard Ambros, head of the Novartis Venture Funds. "Novartis is very excited to be collaborating with Forma to access their biology and chemistry expertise and powerful discovery tools to unlock this challenging target class."

- read the release [2]

Related Article:
Forma sheds secrecy, reveals $25M in financing [3]