Just 14 months after Novartis signed an $800 million biobucks neuroscience partnership with BioArctic, the Swiss pharma has walked away from the deal.
The partnership, signed in August 2025, saw Novartis pay $30 million upfront in an effort to combine BioArctic’s BrainTransporter technology with a Novartis antibody “with an undisclosed target in neurodegeneration.” The deal made BioArctic eligible for $772 million in milestone payments, as well as “tiered mid-single digit" royalties on sales of any medicine resulting from the pact.
The Swedish company’s tech is designed to use the transferrin receptor (TfR) to help with the passage of biological drugs into the brain. BioArctic also developed the Alzheimer’s disease drug Leqembi along with Eisai.
“Collaborating with BioArctic allows us to explore the exciting potential of the BrainTransporter technology to promote brain uptake and optimize systemic delivery of novel therapeutic agents by leveraging the biology of the blood-brain barrier,” Novartis executives said when it signed the deal last year.
But Novartis has clearly now had second thoughts, with BioArctic announcing Monday afternoon that the Big Pharma has decided to discontinue the program. The biotech said the decision was “unrelated to BioArctic's BrainTransporter technology.”
Fierce has reached out to Novartis to understand the reasons for ending the collaboration.
Stymied by the blood-brain barrier (BBB), companies have struggled to get effective doses of antibodies and other large molecules to neurological disorder targets. The difficulties have impeded attempts to treat a range of diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
The deal with BioArctic was just one of the ways that Novartis has been scouting out options for getting molecules into the brain. Earlier this year, Bob Baloh, M.D., Ph.D., global head of neuroscience at Novartis Biomedical Research, told Fierce that there is unlikely to be one solution to the BBB problem. Believing a toolbox of technologies will be needed, Baloh said Novartis is always looking for new ways to cross the barrier.
This included the pharma’s decision in September to pay $125 million to take up its option to acquire Sironax’s brain delivery platform.
Novartis’ pipeline has come under scrutiny in recent months following failed phase 3 trials for the antibody-oligonucleotide conjugate del-desiran in a rare muscle-wasting disease and the cardiovascular drug pelacarsen.
BioArctic may be missing out on $772 million in milestone payments, but it has at least kept the $30 million upfront fee from Novartis. The company can also take solace in its other Big Pharma partnerships, including an Alzheimer’s disease pact with Bristol Myers Squibb and a BrainTransporter collab with Eli Lilly.
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