(Bloomberg) -- GSK Plc agreed on a partnership deal worth as much as $650 million with US biotech Vesalius Therapeutics to help advance drug development for Parkinson’s disease.
GSK will pay $80 million upfront and as much as $570 million to gain full development and commercialization rights to Vesalius’s early-stage drug program that has an initial focus on the degenerative brain condition.
Vesalius, founded by venture capital firm Flagship Pioneering, has a platform that uses AI, genomics and other models to identify new ways to treat diseases. It can create human avatars with different disease characteristics that can be used in a laboratory to define what intervention might be needed. This allows researchers to see how drugs work without testing them directly on patients.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company is using this platform to find new ways to treat Parkinson’s as well as another neurodegenerative condition. GSK will have the option to take these programs forward.
Using a combination of avatars and human clinical data will help identify the best match between how a drug might affect the body and what specific patients would respond to it, said Vesalius’ Executive Chairman John Mendlein.
GSK’s traditional strengths are in vaccines, HIV and respiratory diseases. However, in recent years it has sought to beef up its drug pipeline in other areas. In 2021, it agreed on a $2.2 billion dementia drug deal with Alector.
The interest from GSK in Parkinson’s comes as drugmakers increasingly try to crack neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s.
“As we all learn to live for a longer period of time, our brains weren’t necessarily evolved to live for the same length of time,” Mendlein said in an interview. “There’s an opportunity to find new ways of intervening in brain health. That could be very large markets going forward.”
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