Sosei Heptares, AbbVie enter new multi-target collaboration worth $1.2B

Japanese firm Sosei Group Corporation & US-based AbbVie, a researchbased global biopharmaceutical company, have entered a new drug discovery collaboration & option-to-licence agreement to discover, develop & commercialise small molecules that modulate novel G proteincoupled receptor (GPCR) targets associated with neurological disease. The new agreement will leverage Sosei Heptares’ StaR technology & structure-based drug design (SBDD) platform & AbbVie’s extensive neuroscience and disease area expertise. The agreement expands the breadth of the ongoing collaboration between Sosei Heptares and AbbVie, building on the first multi-target discovery agreement signed between the companies in June 2020, which is focused on the inflammatory and autoimmune disease areas. Under the terms of the new agreement, Sosei Heptares will conduct & fund R&D activities through the completion of Investigational New Drug (IND)-enabling studies.