Sanofi has tapped Alloy Therapeutics to enable development of a central nervous system drug, agreeing to pay $27.5 million in upfront and near-term fees to access an antisense platform.
Alloy is pitching its platform as a way to improve the potency and therapeutic window of antisense drugs and thereby address long-standing limitations of the modality. The biotech began offering the platform in 2023 after striking a deal for technology developed by Sudhir Agrawal. The Arnay Sciences founder came up with a new conformation of the oligonucleotide to enable the claimed benefits of the platform.
Sanofi has paid the upfront fee and committed to discovery, development and commercial milestones of more than $400 million to get its hands on the platform. The deal allows the French drugmaker to use Alloy’s technology against a single target.
Details are scarce, as is typical with such early-stage deals. Alloy said it will work with Sanofi to use the platform “for delivery of therapeutics to the brain, aiming to develop a novel class of genetic medicine capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier.” But key details such as the target of the drug candidate and the diseases it could treat remain under wraps for now.
News of the deal arrived around two months after Sanofi made another investment in antisense R&D, an area in which it currently has little presence. The earlier deal gave Sanofi a stake in Resalis Therapeutics, an Italian biotech that is advancing an antisense oligonucleotide that targets a noncoding RNA involved in obesity pathways.
Sanofi was once at the leading edge of antisense R&D, with its Genzyme unit winning FDA approval for the oligonucleotide Kynamro in 2013. However, Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Genzyme’s partner on the drug, terminated the deal amid slow sales in 2016 and the product was pulled from the market in 2019.