Dr Antonin de Fougerolles, Chief Executive Officer of Evox, commented: “We are delighted to have entered into this strategically important, multi-target partnership with Takeda, a recognised leader in the development of treatments for rare diseases. We look forward to working with Takeda to advance these exosome drugs towards the clinic. Additionally, the deal significantly extends our cash runway into late 2022 and allows us to aggressively expand our own proprietary pipeline of rare disease drugs, including a urea cycle disorder programme we expect to enter the clinic in 2021.”
The partnership will focus on developing up to five novel protein replacement and mRNA therapies”
Madhu Natarajan, Head of the Rare Diseases Drug Discovery Unit at Takeda, commented: “Evox Therapeutics has developed a novel approach toward treating devastating diseases, such as Niemann-Pick Type C. The targeted and non-targeted exosomes offer a highly differentiated platform with the potential to enhance tissue delivery for a variety of payloads like mRNA and proteins. Collaborating on the Evox exosome platform also complements our expanding capabilities in cell and gene therapies, particularly with the potential to develop new delivery approaches in addition to our cutting-edge adeno-associated virus (AAV) platform, to provide transformative therapies or functional cures for people living with rare diseases.”
Evox will be primarily responsible for R&D activities for each programme until Investigational New Drug (IND)-enabling studies and for manufacturing up to and including Phase I clinical trials. Takeda will reimburse Evox for manufacturing costs incurred after the pre-clinical handover of the programmes.
