Nuevolution Announces Licence Agreement with Merck

Nuevolution A/S has entered an exclusive licence agreement with a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc., known as MSD outside the US and Canada, for small molecule compounds targeting an undisclosed intracellular target for use as leads in Merck’s drug discovery and development. 

Under terms of the agreement, Merck will gain exclusive rights for the further development and commercialisation of the compounds. This is the second agreement between Nuevolution and Merck. Nuevolution will receive an undisclosed upfront payment and milestone payments for certain preclinical, clinical and agreed upon commercial milestones. In addition, Nuevolution is eligible to receive royalties on the commercial sales of approved products.  Further financial details were not disclosed.

With this agreement, Nuevolution delivers on its new strategy to transform from a technology platform biotech company to a lead compound development company, providing novel products to improve future health treatments for patients.

Nuevolution applies its Chemetics platform to identify small molecule drug candidates for therapeutically important targets. Chemetics uses proprietary innovative DNA labelling to allow small molecule screening at an unprecedented scale for lead discovery. The technology allows efficient screening of billions of molecules against biological targets. Nuevolution has patented its Chemetics technology and holds a strong validated patent portfolio within the technology field. In its existing collaborations and internal pipeline development, Nuevolution has successfully addressed several challenging targets including protein-protein interactions by the identification of drug-like small molecules.

“This agreement is the first pre-clinical compound out-licensing agreement for Nuevolution. It marks the immediate realisation of our chosen strategy to both offer access to our technology as well as out-license leads identified by the use of the Chemetics platform” said Alex Gouliaev, CEO of Nuevolution A/S and continued, “We are very pleased to see that the compounds will be developed further by Merck.”

Stig Løkke Pedersen, Chairman of Nuevolution A/S adds: “looking at our deal track record, Chemetics has provided us with a commercially proven lead discovery engine. The out-licensing of compounds represents the best future source of sustainable growth for the company. It is very encouraging to see existing partnerships develop into long term relationships.”