OXFORD: e-therapeutics plc (AIM: ETX), a specialist in computational drug discovery with a focus on developing RNA interference (RNAi) therapeutics, announced that it has entered into a research collaboration agreement with iTeos Therapeutics Inc. (Nasdaq: ITOS), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering the discovery and development of a new generation of highly differentiated immuno-oncology therapeutics for patients.
The collaboration will focus on the discovery of novel therapeutic approaches and targets in immuno-oncology. e-therapeutics will remain free to explore additional collaborations in the space.
Under the terms of the agreement, e-therapeutics will receive upfront and near-term cash payments material to the revenue of the Company. The Company is also eligible to receive undisclosed milestone payments through pre-clinical and clinical development, in addition to regulatory milestones per programme.
The collaboration will combine key expertise from both companies, including e-therapeutics’ computational platform and iTeos’ proprietary assays.
iTeos is a leader in the immuno-oncology space developing next-generation therapies for patients with cancer. e-therapeutics’ computational platform and in silico predictions have been experimentally validated across multiple therapeutic areas (including in immuno-oncology), demonstrating its ability to reproducibly assess millions of therapeutic hypotheses, gain insights into lesser-known mechanistic disease processes and identify therapeutic interventions with a higher probability of success than standard drug discovery processes.
This translates into a more efficient drug discovery process with greater scope for novelty, as well as significant time and cost savings.
Ali Mortazavi, Chief Executive Officer of e-therapeutics, commented: “We are extremely pleased to partner with iTeos to help identify highly differentiated immuno-oncology medicines for patients. We believe that our computational platform can discover novel therapeutic approaches for iTeos to prosecute in a hugely promising area of cancer treatment. This collaboration provides further validation of the value of our network-driven, disease agnostic computational platform, which we will continue to leverage as we build our in-house RNAi based pipeline.”