As it builds out a pipeline of digital therapeutics spanning a wide range of conditions—from smoking cessation to depression to schizophrenia—Click Therapeutics has made a habit of turning to the experts in those treatment areas for help.
It’s upholding that tradition as it constructs a digital program to help treat a variety of substance use disorders: Click announced Thursday that it has tapped Indivior, the British drugmaker behind Suboxone and a variety of other addiction-targeting therapeutics, to share its expertise in that arena as the development process begins.
The partnership will focus first on opioid use disorder, or OUD. The duo will start with a “preliminary exploration phase,” during which they’ll define the scope of an app-based digital therapeutic—currently dubbed CT-102—that could be used to help treat the condition in tandem with a pharmacological regimen. This exploratory phase will stretch into 2024, the partners said, after which they’ll lay out a longer-term development plan.
Click will be leading the creation of CT-102 with full responsibility for all technical and clinical development, necessary regulatory filings and other steps on the way to commercialization. Indivior, meanwhile, will have global rights to license the resulting digital therapeutic.
The companies didn’t offer up financial terms of their collaboration but said in the release that Click will be eligible to receive “double-digit royalties” on Indivior’s global sales of the technology as well as upfront license and early development payments and milestone payouts as the product hits certain regulatory and commercial benchmarks.
And the OUD app is set to be just the beginning of what Click and Indivior have termed a multiproduct collaboration—giving Click the potential to reap even bigger rewards if the duo rolls out additional digital therapeutics in the future.
Throughout this and all future development work, they’re planning to combine Click’s artificial-intelligence-powered technology with the pharma’s decades of expertise in the field of substance use disorders to create multiple digital therapeutic programs that provide behavioral therapy and other psychosocial treatments for the conditions. These treatments can be beneficial when used alongside a prescribed drug regimen but may not always be easily accessible to individuals receiving addiction treatment, Click noted in the announcement.
The Indivior partnership on CT-102 marks the fourth of Click’s digital therapeutics to be developed in partnership with the pharmaceutical industry. An ongoing partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim spans two of Click’s schizophrenia treatments—one of which is now in phase 3 pivotal trials—while Otsuka Pharmaceutical came aboard in 2019 to team up on a digital approach to treating major depressive disorder.
Outside of those pharma tie-ups, in addition to its already launched Clickotine program for smoking cessation, Click is working solo on the development of digital therapeutics for conditions including insomnia, acute coronary syndrome, multiple sclerosis and migraine, the last of which recently earned breakthrough designation from the FDA.