AbbVie partners with Frontier Medicines on difficult-to-drug targets

US pharma major AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) and Frontier Medicines, a precision medicine company launched last year with a $67 million financing round, today announced a global strategic collaboration to discover, develop and commercialize a pipeline of innovative small molecule therapeutics against high-interest, difficult-to-drug protein targets.

Under the multi-year collaboration, AbbVie and Frontier will utilize Frontier's proprietary chemoproteomics platform to identify small molecules for programs directed to novel E3 ligases and certain oncology and immunology targets.

Under the terms of the agreement, AbbVie will pay Frontier $55 million upfront in cash, and Frontier is eligible to receive additional milestone payments. In addition, AbbVie will reimburse Frontier's R&D costs through defined stages of pre-clinical development. The companies will collaborate on the research and pre-clinical development of programs directed against E3 ligase, immunology and oncology targets. Upon successful completion of defined stages of pre-clinical development, AbbVie will assume full responsibility for global development and commercialization activities and costs for the programs. Frontier will retain an option to share development activities and expenses for certain oncology programs through the completion of Phase II.