Nimbus Therapeutics receives $200 million payment from Gilead
pharmafile | November 2, 2016 | News story | Research and Development | Gilead Sciences, Nimbus Therapeutics, nash
Nimbus Therapeutics only signed a deal with Gilead Sciences back in April of this year and yet have already received $600 million of a potential $1.2 billion deal.
Nimbus is a biotech that integrates computational chemistry and other advanced technologies to design medicines and to update the way drugs are developed. Nimbus built a program for a drug that targets an enzyme called Acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC) that is involved in the creation of endogenous fatty acids and the regulation of beta-oxidation. This process is the one whereby fatty acids are broken down at a cellular level.
Drugs that have the potential to inhibit ACC therefore have the potential to prevent production of new lipids within the liver and stimulate their breakdown. This is particularly important in the treatment of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which is a chronic liver disease that is caused by excessive fat accumulation in the liver. The condition can lead to liver scarring and cirrhosis, which can lead to liver failure and death.
Nimbus received the $600 million payment in relation to hitting an assigned development milestone, with Gilead currently in Phase II trials. In a statement, they revealed that the payment would be reinvested back into Nimbus to expand its core capabilities and to advance their preclinical pipeline. Further that this, the below statement was released:
“We are thrilled at the rapid progress that Gilead has made in developing the ACC program, which is currently in Phase 2 clinical trials for NASH,” said Don Nicholson, chief executive officer of Nimbus. “As the first prospectively in silico-designed molecule to reach human clinical testing, NDI-010976 is an important validation of our unique computational chemistry approach. We are applying this model to design medicines that have a meaningful impact on the mechanistically interrelated areas of metabolic disease, oncology and immunology.”
Ben Hargreaves
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