Roivant strikes broad pipeline pact with Daiichi

Roivant has secured an option to license a stream of drugs from Daiichi Sankyo. The deal is the first time Roivant has formed a framework to facilitate the ongoing in-licensing of drugs from a company rather than picked up assets on an ad hoc basis.

Through the deal, Roivant has gained the option to exclusively license certain programs from Daiichi in return for prespecified financial packages tied to the phases of development. As such, Roivant is framing the agreement as a platform collaboration, not a one-off transaction, that can provide it with an ongoing source of drugs to build new Vant startups around for years to come. 

That idea represents a tweaking of the model Roivant has followed to date, which has entailed cherry-picking one or two assets from multiple companies. Having established the new model with Daiichi, Roivant now wants to enter into similar agreements with other drug developers.

"I hope this can be a model for platform collaborations between Roivant and other innovative biopharmaceutical companies," Roivant President Mayukh Sukhatme said in a statement. 

The move toward platform collaborations is part of the ongoing evolution of Roivant’s approach, the first version of which was defined by the $5 million acquisition of intepirdine from GlaxoSmithKline. Back then, the typical Roivant deal involved a small upfront and an advanced but unloved biopharma asset.

More recently, Roivant and its subsidiaries have diversified their strategies, picking up earlier-phase programs from academic groups and engaging in their own research. The Daiichi deal continues that evolution.

For Daiichi, the deal gives it a built-in buyer for some of its pipeline programs. The Japanese company has previously expressed an interest in finding ways to get its drugs to patients without tying up its internal resources. That thinking led to deals such as this week’s agreement with AnHeart Therapeutics, which saw Daiichi offload the rights to a ROS1-NTRK inhibitor.

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