Bridgene and Takeda have inked a deal worth $770m to develop small molecules for immunology and neurology.
Takeda will pay $46m upfront to leverage BridGene’s chemoproteomics platform, dubbed IMTAC. The platform screens small molecules against all the proteins in live cells to discover drug candidates for “high value and hard-to-drug targets” that cause diseases, according to BridGene’s website. The company highlighted that about 90% of proteins associated with diseases cannot be targeted with traditional therapies due to the lack of a known addressable binding site.
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Takeda will hold exclusive rights to develop and commercialise any resulting drugs from the collaboration. In addition to the upfront payment, BridGene could receive up to $770m in additional milestone payments, along with tiered royalties.
The companies previously teamed up in March 2021 for a similar deal worth $500m to start up to five drug discovery programmes. Using BridGene’s IMTAC platform, this programme focused on identifying targets believed to underlie neurodegenerative disease. BridGene announced that it had hit two milestones under the agreement in 2023.
In the announcement accompanying the latest deal, Takeda’s chief scientific officer Christopher Arendt said: “By integrating BridGene’s IMTAC platform with Takeda’s scientific expertise, we aim to unlock a broader range of targets that have been considered undruggable, aligning with our core strategy in small molecule drug discovery.”
Takeda has been on a wave of dealmaking over the last year. In December 2024, the Japanese pharma company spent $200m in exchange for Keros Therapeutics’ investigational activin inhibitor elritercept to treat anaemia. As part of the deal, Keros could secure up to $1.1bn in development, approval, and sales milestones.
This follows on from a November 2024 agreement with Alloy Therapeutics to develop chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T therapies using Takeda’s proprietary induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) platforms, which aim to improve treatment options for both solid tumours and blood cancers.
Two more billion-dollar deals with Takeda took place in May 2024. One was for AC Immune’s amyloid beta-targeting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) immunotherapy, in a deal worth up to $2.2bn. The second pact saw Takeda spend $1.2bn to develop molecular glue degraders with Degron Therapeutics for multiple targets in the three disease areas.
