Nxera wins $15m from Neurocrine Biosciences via schizophrenia drug dosing
Nxera, based locally at Granta Park, previously announced the initiation of the Phase 3 programme in May. The study is a global double-blind, placebo-controlled trial evaluating NBI-’568 in adults with a primary diagnosis of schizophrenia who are experiencing an acute exacerbation or relapse of symptoms.
The study is expected to enrol around 280 patients. The primary endpoint is a reduction from baseline in the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). The key secondary endpoint is improvement in the Clinical Global Impression of Severity (CGI-S) scale.
Nxera Pharma is a technology powered biopharma business globally pursuing new specialty medicines to improve the lives of patients with unmet needs.
It has built what out describes as an agile, new-generation commercial business to develop and commercialise innovative medicines, including several launched products, to address this high value, large and growing market and those in the broader APAC region.
Behind that, and powered by its NxWave™ discovery platform, the company is advancing an extensive pipeline of more than 30 active programmes from discovery through to late clinical stage internally and in partnership with leading pharma and biotech companies.
This pipeline of potentially first and best-in-class candidates is focused on addressing major unmet needs in some of the fastest-growing areas of medicine across neurology/neuropsychiatry, metabolic diseases and immunology and inflammation.
Eli Lilly collaboration
Nxera has also achieved a development milestone under its multi-target collaboration and license agreement with Eli Lilly and Company targeting diabetes and metabolic diseases, resulting in a payment the scale of which the partners won't reveal.
Nxera expects to receive the money in the third quarter of the fiscal year ending December 2025.
The companies entered the multi-target collaboration in 2022 to leverage Nxera’s GPCR-focused structure-based drug design capabilities and Lilly’s extensive development, commercialisation and therapeutic area expertise.
The development milestone validates the use of Nxera’s NxWave™ platform to successfully identify small molecule binders to GPCR targets and to solve the structure of the receptor in the presence of the small molecule, thus revealing its binding site. Lilly will now be responsible for further development and commercialisation.
Nxera is eligible to receive development and commercial milestones totalling up to $694 million, plus tiered royalties on global sales.
Dr. Matt Barnes, CSO and President of Nxera Pharma UK, said: “We’re excited to have achieved this important milestone in this collaboration with Lilly, which marks a significant step towards developing novel treatments in these important areas of unmet need across diabetes and metabolic diseases.
“Our proprietary NxWave™ platform has continuously produced novel molecules for previously intractable targets and we look forward to seeing further developments from this productive collaboration with Lilly.”
Nxera employs around 400 people at key locations in Tokyo and Osaka (Japan), London and Cambridge (UK), Basel (Switzerland) and Seoul (South Korea) and is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.