Boston– Orionis Biosciences has announced a multi-year strategic collaboration with Novartis to discover and develop molecular glue medicines for challenging therapeutic targets across multiple disease areas.
The collaboration expands the existing relationship between the companies and will use Orionis’s Allo-Glue™ platform and AI-driven discovery engine to accelerate target and ligase profiling, as well as molecular glue optimization.
Orionis said the integrated capabilities are designed to support the systematic discovery of small molecule glues that modulate therapeutic targets through induced proximity mechanisms.
Under the agreement, Orionis will receive an upfront payment of $40 million and is eligible for research, development and commercial milestone payments of up to $1.4 billion. The company is also eligible to receive tiered royalties on net sales of collaboration products.
“We are proud to renew and expand our collaboration with Novartis,” said Niko Kley, Chief Executive Officer of Orionis Biosciences. “Having such a partner continue to engage deeply with us is a strong validation of the value of our molecular glue platform and the progress we have achieved toward rational and scalable discovery of this emerging drug class.”
Riccardo Sabatini, Chief Data Scientist at Orionis Biosciences, said the company’s recent advances in AI and robotic automation have accelerated molecular glue discovery, including target-ligase prioritization and candidate optimization.
“This is exactly the kind of platform maturity that makes collaborations like this possible,” Sabatini said.
John Tallarico, Head of Discovery Sciences at Novartis, said the collaboration will help explore the potential of molecular glue modalities across multiple therapeutic areas.
“The Orionis platform offers an opportunity to rapidly uncover and design molecular glue mechanisms, enabling us to expand the horizon of targetable biology for future therapies,” Tallarico said.
