Variant Bio has announced a multi-year research collaboration with Novo Nordisk to discover novel targets for the treatment of metabolic disease. The partnership is aimed at identifying and validating multiple novel targets with sufficient human genetic evidence to initiate human-centric drug discovery programmes.
The collaboration leverages Variant Bio's innovative VB-Inference analysis platform to identify novel targets with strong genetic evidence and clear therapeutic hypotheses. VB-Inference maps the molecular mechanisms of disease by integrating whole genomes with deep phenotyping and rich multi-omic data using statistical genetics and machine learning. This mechanistic understanding has the potential to better inform drug discovery compared to genetic association studies alone and is made possible by extensive transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data. The platform has enabled several new R&D programs within Variant Bio's internal pipeline.
"Metabolic disease - including obesity - affects people all over the world, yet newer targets with genetic evidence are primarily based on studies with European-ancestry populations. As a result, there is still an unmet need in this space," said David Moller, Chief Scientific Officer at Variant Bio. "We hope that a deeper understanding of the relationships between genetic variation and metabolic traits will yield novel targets and ultimately lead to better and more diverse treatment options for people around the globe."
Under the terms of the agreement, Novo Nordisk will pay Variant Bio an upfront payment and additional near-term R&D funding totalling up to US$50 million, plus potential option and milestone payments on targets that arise from the collaboration. Consistent with Variant Bio's long-term benefit-sharing program, this partnership will trigger the distribution of financial benefits to partner communities around the world who contributed their data to genomic research.
"Through our partnership with Variant Bio, we aspire to gain a more complete understanding of the genetic causes of metabolic disease," said Bei Zhang, Corporate Vice President of Global Drug Discovery at Novo Nordisk. "Having conducted over two dozen genomic research projects with diverse populations around the world, Variant Bio is well positioned to carry out genomic research on metabolic disease in places that have not yet been fully studied. We believe that the likelihood of discovering truly novel targets is higher because of the nature of these data. What is more, human genetic evidence should increase our odds of discovering and developing differentiated new therapies for metabolic diseases."