After penning Loxo deal, Bayer signs another $1B R&D pact

Bayer has signed a new and potentially major research pact with Japan’s PeptiDream, marking the second big biobucks deal of its kind for the German pharma in the past week.

There’s no breakdown or word on the upfront payment (though there is one), but the overall deal could be worth as much as $1.11 billion (¥124.5 billion) in milestone bonuses, as well as royalties on sales.

With the normal caveats applied, i.e., hitting all these requires all R&D and sales to hit every milestone perfectly—an unlikely scenario—the deal sees the Japanese biotech use its Peptide Discovery Platform System (PDPS) tech to find macrocyclic/constrained peptides against a whole load of targets "of interest selected by Bayer," as well as to "optimize hit peptides into therapeutic peptides or small molecule products."

The German biopharma also gets an option to haggle for an extension of the license to peptide-drug conjugate (PDC) for "diagnostic, bioimaging, and agricultural use and applications." It keeps hold of the right to develop and sell any and all compounds that could come out of the collaboration.

Patrick Reid, CEO of PeptiDream, said: "We are extremely excited to be initiating this discovery alliance with Bayer. This is one of the broadest discovery deals PeptiDream has entered into, covering peptide therapeutics and small molecule therapeutics, and options to PDCs, diagnostic agents, bioimaging agents, and more.

"This deal further exemplifies the power of our PDPS platform and the impact it is having on early drug discovery. We greatly look forward to working with Bayer to leverage both companies’ expertise and capabilities to discover and development the next generation of first-in-class and best-in-class therapeutics."

This builds on Bayer’s $400 million upfront, $1 billion-plus biobucks deal signed with Loxo Oncology and its tropomyosin receptor kinase (TRK) inhibitor franchise last week. The agreement puts Bayer in charge of global commercialization of a drug that chalked up a 75% response rate in a midphase trial.

In the past seven years, PeptiDream has also been no stranger to biopharma deals, having seen ink dry on pacts with the likes of Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Merck, Sanofi, Janssen and many more.

It’s also handed over its PDPS platform for broad use to Bristol-Myers, Novartis, Lilly, Genentech and Shionogi.

This has helped line up a potential series of deals worth billions of biobucks, which in turn has seen its market cap swell to nearly $4 billion. Its shares, listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, were up 3.27% on the news in the afternoon Japanese time.