Vernalis earns three milestones from oncology drug discovery collaboration

Under its oncology drug discovery collaboration with French independent drugmaker Servier, the UK’s Vernalis (LSE: VER) is eligible to receive milestone payments of 2 million euros ($2.2 million). Two of these were research milestones and the other clinical.

Vernalis and Servier’s partnership has been successfully running for ten years. Their collaboration takes advantage of Vernalis’ proprietary fragment and structure-based drug discovery platform, and of Servier’s expertise in medicinal chemistry, cancer biology and pharmacology to bring innovation in oncology one step further.

The collaboration focuses on complicated molecular targets, some of which, like Mcl1, were considered as undruggable until recently. The clinical milestone announced today corresponds to the first treatment of the first patient in a Servier sponsored trial with a selective Mcl1 inhibitor identified through the oncology drug discovery collaboration between Servier and Vernalis. The discovery and characterization of this family of Mcl1 inhibitors were recently published in Nature. The worldwide clinical development of this promising drug candidate is being undertaken by Servier in collaboration with Novartis.