Evotec, Bristol-Myers expand strategic neurodegeneration partnership

Evotec (EVO) announced that the company has extended and expanded its strategic neurodegeneration partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb (BMY), originally signed in 2016. The initial partnership proved highly productive in generating a promising pipeline of discovery to clinical-stage programs. Based on this success, Bristol Myers Squibb and Evotec extend and expand this partnership for additional eight years with the goal to further broaden and deepen the strategic alliance. Evotec and Bristol Myers Squibb initiated the collaboration in 2016 to identify disease-modifying treatments for a broad range of neurodegenerative diseases. Currently approved drugs only offer short-term management of patients’ symptoms and there is a significant unmet medical need for therapies that slow down or reverse disease progression in the field of neurodegenerative diseases. This partnership pursues an innovative approach to the discovery and development of novel medicines by leveraging several of Evotec’s modality-agnostic precision medicine platforms. The partnership has already been successful in generating a pipeline of discovery and pre-clinical-stage programs. A first programme, EVT8683, was in-licensed by Bristol Myers Squibb in September 2021, following the successful filing of an IND application with the FDA and has proceeded into the clinical Phase I. Evotec receives a $50M upfront payment, undisclosed license and performance milestone payments, as well as tiered royalties up to low double-digit percentages on product sales. Including the upfront and downstream performance milestone payments, the overall transaction results in a deal potential of $4B.