Johnson and Johnson's Janssen and German biotech Evotec announced a drug discovery partnership this week.
The collaboration will allow both companies to leverage Evotec’s TargetAlloMod platforms, which are a suite of proprietary assay principles and computational tools to assess and screen extracellular receptor targets.
Evotec and Janssen will collaborate on screenings and identification of targets, which they hope will lead to the optimization of the most promising chemical assets. In addition to research funding, Evotec will be entitled to success-based research commercial milestones up to approximately $218 million.
“We are very proud to enter into this collaboration to explore unique approaches to high potential cell surface drug targets with novel therapeutic modalities and to deliver and make innovative therapeutic options available to patients,” said Cord Dohrmann, Evotec’s chief scientific officer.
Last year, Evotec inked another technology-leveraging deal with Takeda. Under that agreement, the companies use Evotec's EvoteRNA targeting platform to identify RNA sequences that are amenable to small-molecule ligands. The platform combines established drug discovery methods with new technologies such as third-generation sequencing and sequencing-based RNA structure elucidation.