Connexios Life Sciences and Boehringer Ingelheim Enter Agreement for Novel AMPK Activators

Connexios Life Sciences, a Bangalore based biotechnology company, and Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, today announced an exclusive global research collaboration agreement for AMPK agonists for the treatment of patients with Type 2 Diabetes.

As part of the agreement, Boehringer Ingelheim obtains global rights to CNX-012, Connexios Life Sciences’ program on AMPK activators. The program includes CNX-570 and other compounds in early pre-clinical development. Boehringer Ingelheim will be responsible for all further development and commercialization of the candidates from the AMPK program. Further terms and financial details were not disclosed.

“As a pure research-driven organization from India, we believe that the agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim is a big validation of both our scientific approach and capabilities as well as of our business model.”, commented Suri Venkatachalam, CEO and Founder of Connexios. “CNX-012 is one of our flagship programs which leverages our Network Biology approach and platform and we are extremely pleased to be working with Boehringer Ingelheim to advance candidates from this program. We strongly believe that the collaboration will yield best-in-class activators of this exciting but challenging target and ultimately result in better therapies for patients of Type 2 Diabetes who also suffer from the burden of several other cardiometabolic co-morbidities.”

“Partnering is key to our business strategy and the partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim who have shown a strong commitment to the therapeutic area of metabolic diseases is an important milestone for Connexios. With our strengths in disease biology and drug discovery, we see great complementarity between the organizations and look forward to building on this relationship in future.” added Shobha Vijayaraghavan, Vice President, Business Development of Connexios Life Sciences.

Commenting on the agreement, Michel Pairet, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Research and Development at Boehringer Ingelheim said: “We are extremely pleased to enter into this agreement with Connexios, a company recognised as experts in their field, which will further strengthen our discovery and development efforts in the area of cardiometabolic diseases.”

About CNX-012 and CNX-012-570

CNX-012-570 is the lead candidate from the Connexios program of AMPK activators that directly activate specific isoforms of the protein, designed and selected to bring about a robust impact on the cellular energetics and redox balance across key cell types and tissues. Connexios has shown beneficial outcomes from target modulation across the liver, muscle, adipose and other relevant tissues in preclinical studies across several animal models of disease. The CNX-012 program comprises several other compounds like CNX-012-570 which cover a wide chemistry and patent space.