AbbVie inks global cancer collaboration with Infinity Pharmaceuticals

 

Duvelisib is Infinity’s oral inhibitor of phosphoinositide-3-kinase (PI3K)-delta and PI3K-gamma, and Infinity is currently conducting registration-focused trials to determine the drug’s safety and efficacy, including DYNAMO, a Phase 2 study in patients with indolent non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and DUO, a Phase 3 study in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Duvelisib has demonstrated clinical activity in both cancer types, as well as other blood cancers.

 

Per the terms of the agreement, AbbVie will pay Infinity $275 million up front, with the potential for up to $530 million in additional payments if certain development, regulatory and commercial milestones are met, including up to $405 million for the achievement of milestones through the first commercial sale of the drug. AbbVie and Infinity will jointly commercialize duvelisib in the United States, with an equal split of any profits. Outside of the United States, AbbVie will be responsible for conducting and funding commercialization, and Infinity will be eligible to receive tiered double-digit royalties on net product sales.

 

“This collaboration is an important step toward fulfilling Infinity’s objective of bringing better treatments to patients and further advances our goal of building a sustainable, fully integrated biotechnology company,” Adelene Q. Perkins, chair, president and CEO at Infinity, commented in a statement. “AbbVie will be a wonderful partner for Infinity, bringing all of the expertise and scale of a successful, well-established company, together with the energy, drive, innovation and nimbleness of a young organization. We look forward to advancing duvelisib through monotherapy studies designed to enable registration and in furthering our shared longer-term vision of combining duvelisib with both current standards of care and novel, targeted therapies.”

 

The companies will also share the responsibilities for conducting trials within an agreed-upon global development plan, with each of them leading the development of certain of those trials. For the initial global development plan, Infinity will fund the trials it conducts, and Infinity and AbbVie will share the costs of trials conducted by AbbVie. The agreement includes the planned launch of several Phase 2 and Phase 3 studies of duvelisib in hematologic malignancies over the course of the next few years.

 

“We believe that duvelisib is a very promising investigational treatment based on clinical data showing activity in a broad range of blood cancers. The addition of duvelisib will complement AbbVie's emerging oncology pipeline and expand our research into combination therapies to generate improved outcomes for cancer patients. We look forward to working with Infinity to bring duvelisib to patients worldwide,” Michael Severino, M.D., AbbVie’s executive vice president and chief scientific officer, said in a press release.

 

AbbVie announced a novel R&D collaboration with Calico (California Life Sciences LLC), the Google-supported life-sciences company, today as well. The focus of the collaboration will be the discovery, development and commercialization of new therapies for patients suffering from age-related diseases, including neurodegeneration and cancer.

 

 

SOURCE: AbbVie press release