Morphic Therapeutic has lost another Big Pharma partner. Eleven months after AbbVie walked away, Johnson & Johnson has delivered the killer blow to its own already-diminishing ties to the biotech.
J&J’s Janssen paid Morphic $10 million for each of its first two research programs and then dropped a further $5 million two years ago to start a third program and expand the pact to cover activating antibodies. In December 2021, Janssen walked away from the first two targets over the lack of target validation in the disease of interest, but Morphic continued to work on the third program.
Now, the J&J subsidiary has decided to scrap the alliance altogether. The termination of the agreement, which will take effect by mid-March, will immediately end the rights and licenses covered by the deal.
The action comes 11 months after AbbVie ditched Morphic, in that case over a safety signal seen during preclinical testing. AbbVie was working with the biotech to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and other fibrotic diseases through inhibition of alpha V beta 6, one of the targets against which Pliant Therapeutics has just enjoyed success.
Less is known publicly about the focus of the J&J collaboration. Morphic said “cardio/renal/metabolic” indications were the focus, adding that the alliance expanded the targets addressed by its platform to cover alpha 1 integrins and modulators that are both inhibitors and activators. The deal had exclusivity obligations related to chronic kidney disease and acute kidney injury.
The loss of the partnerships raises questions about Morphic’s work to realize the therapeutic potential of integrins, receptors that transmit bi-directional signals across the plasma membrane. Big Pharma largely turned its back on the targets 20 years ago in the wake of phase 3 failures, but the approval of Takeda’s Entyvio and work at biotechs including Morphic has raised the prospect of a resurgence.
Morphic’s SVP of corporate communications Chris Erdman brushed off a suggestion that the end of the AbbVie and Janssen collaborations puts the biotech’s work in doubt. “These are both areas that had unproven biology, where partners came to us to use our platform to see whether they could advance programs in different therapeutic areas,” Erdman told Fierce Biotech in an interview this morning.
“I'm not trying to paint this as some wild success, but one thing to note is that in both cases we were asked to do something that has eluded people before, which was to create highly selective small molecules against these integrin targets,” he added. “And in both cases, we delivered or exceeded the parameters set by AbbVie and Janssen.”
While Morphic doesn’t have any plans to advance the specific targets handed back by Janssen at this time, the third and final target the two companies were working on “provided us with an entrée to the antibody space,” Erdman said.
“What that expansion of the agreement did was allow us to enter a newer area and a new modality as opposed to simply focusing on small molecules,” he said. “And that is something that we've added to the Morphic platform that we may be able to deploy in future programs.”
This article was updated at 08:50am ET on January 23 to include comments from Morphic.