Zealand Pharma is paying Generate Biomedicines $30 million upfront to collaborate on multispecific drug candidates for metabolic diseases. Milestones could bring the total value of the deal above $1 billion.
Obesity and other metabolic diseases form the backbone of Zealand’s pipeline, which includes weight-loss drug candidates partnered with Boehringer Ingelheim and Roche. The pipeline is built on Zealand’s long history of peptide R&D, but the Danish drugmaker has expanded into other modalities in the past year through partnerships with OTR Therapeutics and now Generate.
Having accessed OTR’s small-molecule platform in December, Zealand this week moved into protein drug development by partnering with Generate. Zealand has tasked Generate with designing and developing multispecific protein therapeutics using an AI-enabled platform. Generate will oversee research through lead-candidate selection before handing over to Zealand for clinical development onward.
For the two initial partnered programs, Generate will receive the upfront fee and up to $35 million in early preclinical milestones. The deal features nearly $1.2 billion in total milestones tied to development, regulatory and commercial achievements. Zealand is also on the hook for tiered royalties on worldwide net sales of any commercial products resulting from the agreement.
“This collaboration expands our toolbox to include proteins, complementing our existing small-molecule and peptide capabilities and opening new approaches for polypharmacology for innovative therapeutics,” Zealand's Chief Scientific Officer Utpal Singh, Ph.D., said in the release.
The deal also “reflects our strategy of expanding our platform and integrating our metabolic expertise in Copenhagen with the multi-modality expertise in Cambridge to develop next-generation therapeutics for metabolic health,” Singh added.
Zealand’s obesity pipeline centers on a Roche-partnered amylin analog and a Boehringer-partnered glucagon/GLP-1 receptor dual agonist. Both candidates are in phase 3, but neither has wowed analysts so far. Phase 3 data on the Boehringer program sent Zealand’s stock price down at the start of October, while recent phase 2 weight loss and blood sugar data on the Roche asset also disappointed analysts.
Generate’s internal pipeline focuses on immunology, inflammation and oncology. GB-0895, an anti-TSLP monoclonal antibody in phase 3 development for severe asthma, is the biotech’s most advanced asset. Amgen and Novartis have recognized the broader utility of Generate’s platform, teaming up with the biotech in 2022 and 2024, respectively, to develop protein therapeutics in multiple disease areas.
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