Daily Newsletter

26 September 2023

Daily Newsletter

26 September 2023

Novo Nordisk and Valo to develop cardiometabolic disease therapies

Valo is eligible to receive potential milestone payments of $2.7bn for up to 11 programmes from Novo Nordisk.

Vishnu Priyan September 26 2023

Novo Nordisk has signed an agreement with Valo Health for the discovery and development of new therapies to treat cardiometabolic diseases.

The companies will leverage the AI-driven large human dataset and computation expertise of Valo to develop the treatments.

The alliance will also utilise the Opal Computational Platform of Valo and the real-world data of patients, AI-powered small molecule discovery and a human tissue modelling platform known as Biowire.

The preclinical expertise of Valo will be leveraged to detect and validate new druggable targets.

The partnership will also utilise these capabilities to develop drug candidates against these targets and forecast their safety and efficacy.

Novo Nordisk will license three preclinical drug discovery programmes developed using Valo’s platform for treating cardiovascular ailments.

Valo is entitled to receive upfront and near-term milestone payments of $60m (£49.19m) from Novo Nordisk. 

Novo Nordisk will also make potential milestone payments of $2.7bn for up to 11 programmes, apart from funds for research and development and royalties.

Novo Nordisk executive vice-president and chief scientific officer Marcus Schindler stated: “Artificial Intelligence and machine learning hold the promise to positively impact drug discovery and development, in particular enabling our vision of leveraging human datasets early in the process, which should lead to a better understanding of target biology. 

“Valo brings a differentiated and powerful approach to using these technologies on real-world human data to generate new insights and translate them into potential therapeutics for the benefit of patients suffering from cardiometabolic conditions.”

The latest development comes after Novo Nordisk partnered with the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard to identify drug targets for type 2 diabetes and cardiometabolic diseases.

M&A in the Contract Manufacturing Industry

Despite challenging business conditions in 2021 and 2022, large CMOs were still involved in acquisitions to enhance their capabilities or scale of production. Catalent and Recipharm were particularly active in acquiring companies during this period, and these acquisitions had a focus on advanced biologic capabilities related to cell and gene therapies. CMOs are increasingly targeting companies with sophisticated (biologic and specialized) capabilities to manufacture modern drugs and seek high-value contracts.

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