AbbVie has been a longtime supporter of Morphic Therapeutic, chipping into multiple venture rounds and forking over $100 million upfront in an R&D deal. Now, the Big Pharma is taking the next step: It’s paying Morphic $20 million to pick up its integrin inhibitors for the treatment of fibrotic diseases.
Morphic’s pipeline takes aim at integrins, which are cell surface receptors found on most cells. Integrin signaling is involved in many cellular functions, and abnormal signaling has been implicated in autoimmune diseases and immuno-oncology as well as in fibrosis.
The news comes nearly two years after the duo first teamed up. Under the original deal, Morphic would handle R&D work on its pipeline through IND-enabling studies, at which point AbbVie would decide whether it would take each compound forward. Clearly, AbbVie liked what it saw.
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The Big Pharma is licensing drugs that inhibit an integrin called alpha V beta 6 (αvβ6), which activates TGF-beta, a protein that promotes scarring in tissues. These programs include MORF-720 and MORF-627, which are in development for fibrotic diseases such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a rare and fatal disease in which progressive scarring in the lungs makes breathing difficult and prevents the lungs from delivering enough oxygen to the rest of the body.
There are only two approved drugs for IPF—Boehringer Ingelheim’s Ofev and Genentech’s Esbriet—but they work by delaying disease progression and do not cure the disease. Other treatments include supplemental oxygen and pulmonary rehabilitation, which focus on managing symptoms, or a lung transplant, a procedure for which some patients are too frail.
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Beyond the $20 million license fee, Morphic stands to pick up milestone payments and royalties. It also has the option to share costs with AbbVie on liver fibrosis indications and can choose to pay a percentage of its partner’s development costs in exchange for “enhanced royalties.”
“AbbVie has been an excellent partner through the preclinical development of this program and we believe that their decision to assume leadership for the next stages of development is a strong vote of confidence in our collaboration, as well as Morphic’s MInT platform to generate orally available integrin inhibitors,” Morphic CEO Praveen Tipirneni, M.D., said in a statement.
Integrin inhibitors are not new; Takeda’s inflammatory bowel disease drug, Entyvio, is an injectable antibody to integrin alpha 4 beta 7. Morphic’s scientific founder, Tim Springer, discovered it during his time at LeukoSite.
Because injectable integrin blockers worked so well, several pharma companies tried to create oral versions, which would be preferable for treating chronic disease, Tipirneni said in a previous interview. Six different pharmas took projects into phase 3, but they all failed, he said. It turned out the drugs failed not just by falling short of placebo but by actually making people’s disease worse.
Morphic was born after Springer figured out why oral integrins were failing and took his idea to Polaris Partners. Springer, Polaris, Schrödinger and ShangPharma Investment Group created the company in 2015. It raised $51.5 million in series A funding the next year and another $80 million in its B round in 2018.