BRIEF—Evotec achieves milestone in neuroscience collaboration with BMS

German biotech Evotec today said it has achieved further significant progress within its neuroscience collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb.

The collaboration expands the portfolio by two additional drug discovery projects and has designated a target-based program for further development, triggering payments in total of $26 million to Evotec.

The collaboration was initiated in December 2016 with the goal of identifying disease-modifying treatments for a broad range of neurodegenerative diseases.

Currently approved drugs only offer short-term management of the patients’ symptoms and there is a huge unmet medical need for treatments that slow down or reverse disease progression.

The collaboration leverages Evotec’s precision medicine technologies for modality-agnostic drug discovery and development.

A first program originating from the collaboration, EVT8683, was in-licensed by Bristol Myers Squibb in September 2021, following the successful filing of an investigational new drug (IND) application with the US Food and Drug Administration.