Charles River Laboratories International, Inc.

Pfizer and Flagship Pioneering have entered into an agreement aimed at discovering potential selective inhibitors for autoimmune diseases. The collaboration between Pfizer and Pioneering Medicines, Flagship’s in-house drug discovery and development unit, will seek to discover compounds “which may lead to the development of next-generation therapeutics” for these disorders. More than 100 known types of autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis, affect over 50 million people in the US. They occur when the immune system is unable to distinguish between healthy cells and invading pathogens. Pfizer and Flagship will engage Charles River Laboratories to leverage Logica, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform offering from Flagship-founded Valo Health, to identify advanceable small molecule leads. Logica is designed to translate biological insights into preclinical assets using Valo’s Opal Computational Platform and Charles River’s capabilities in drug discovery and preclinical development, and has just been used to identify a product candidate for different forms of lupus and other autoimmune indications with unmet needs. Paul Biondi, president of Pioneering Medicines and managing partner at Flagship Pioneering, said: “Autoimmune diseases impose a substantial health burden on patients, and ongoing unmet need in the management of these conditions is driving a strong demand for more effective, safer and more personalised treatment options. “Through the power of our unique partnership model with Pfizer, we will leverage Logica to help address this gap with a promising novel approach to identifying disease-modifying candidate molecules that could positively impact the current treatment landscape for these complex and diverse conditions.” The agreement represents the sixth collaboration signed under a broader strategic partnership between Pfizer and Flagship, after the companies announced programmes with Flagship’s ProFound Therapeutics, Quotient Therapeutics, Montai Therapeutics and Ampersand Biomedicines. Pfizer and Flagship announced the original collaboration worth $7bn in 2023, noting that they were aiming to accelerate the development of innovative medicines. As part of the wider agreement, the companies aim to invest in and develop a new pipeline of up to ten programmes for areas including internal medicine, oncology, infectious diseases and immunology, according to the 2023 announcement.

Flagship-founded Valo Health marks the sixth collaboration for the $7 billion biobucks, 10-program collaboration between Pfizer and Flagship.\n Pfizer and Flagship Pioneering are turning to autoimmune disease as the sixth plank of their multibillion-dollar, 10-program partnership.The agreement will see Flagship’s in-house drug developer unit Pioneering Medicines work with Pfizer to “discover compounds which may lead to the development of next-generation therapeutics for autoimmune diseases,” according to an April 1 release.Pioneering Medicine has already been working with Charles River Laboratories and Valo Health’s Logica molecule designing platform. Last week, they announced that this effort had yielded its first drug candidate—a small molecule intended to treat lupus and other as yet unidentified autoimmune diseases.It sounds like Pfizer and Flagship want to jump on this success, by tapping up the major contract research player that is Charles River and AI drug developer Valo Health, founded by Flagship back in 2019, to find more autoimmune candidates.“Autoimmune diseases impose a substantial health burden on patients, and ongoing unmet need in the management of these conditions is driving a strong demand for more effective, safer and more personalized treatment options,” Paul Biondi, President of Pioneering Medicines, and a Managing Partner at Flagship Pioneering, said in this morning’s release.“Through the power of our unique partnership model with Pfizer, we will leverage Logica to help address this gap with a promising novel approach to identifying disease-modifying candidate molecules that could positively impact the current treatment landscape for these complex and diverse conditions,” Biondi added. Valo Health now marks the sixth collaboration for the $7 billion biobucks, 10-program collaboration between Pfizer and Flagship that was first announced in 2023. The general purpose of the programs covered by the wide-ranging partnership is to address unmet needs within Pfizer’s core strategic areas of interest. The Big Pharma can pluck partnerships from Flagship’s ecosystem that currently spans 40 companies.Pfizer and Flagship picked obesity as the first target, perhaps not surprising given the major industry interest in the area, with the New York pharma giant working with Flagship’s ProFound Therapeutics to find new proteins and determine whether they can be used for new obesity therapeutics. They followed this up with a deal to use Quotient’s somatic genomics platform to discover new targets for two programs in cardiovascular and renal diseases, then obesity and lung cancer work with Ampersand and Montai, respectively.Autoimmune diseases have also long proved major money spinners for pharma, with drugs on the market for conditions such as Crohn\'s, ulcerative colitis, arthritis and multiple sclerosis, to name but a few, making megablockbuster sales over the years. “We are excited to bring the power of the Logica platform— powered by Valo and Charles River—to discover potential investigational therapies for patients suffering from autoimmune diseases,” Charles River’s Chief Scientific Officer Julie Frearson, Ph.D., said in this morning\'s release.“Logica\'s proprietary AI small molecule drug discovery platform is revolutionizing the drug discovery process, and we look forward to working with the joint team at Pioneering Medicines and Pfizer to accelerate understanding of the molecular pathways involved in these diseases to develop more targeted and effective therapies for patients,” Frearson added.No financial details of the latest collaboration were released.

The new molecule was identified using Logica, a drug discovery solution that Charles River and Valo first launched in April 2022.\n The drug discovery pact between Charles River Laboratories, Valo Health and Flagship Pioneering is starting to bear fruit. Charles River and Valo’s molecule designing platform has yielded its first drug candidate, a small molecule intended to treat lupus and other as yet unidentified autoimmune diseases, the partners announced March 25.“The target [outside lupus] is confidential, but this is a small-molecule inhibitor program for a first-in-class target for autoimmune disease,” Julie Frearson, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Charles River Labs, told Fierce Biotech in an email. “There are currently no drugs on the market that modulate this target.”Charles River and Flagship-backed Valo Health, along with the drug development arm of Flagship Pioneering, Pioneering Medicines, are now working to solidify the molecule as a preclinical asset.“We will deliver a high-quality, derisked preclinical candidate in a shorter timeline than conventional drug discovery efforts,” Frearson said, at which point Pioneering Medicines will take over development. The new molecule was identified using Logica, a drug discovery solution that Charles River and Valo first launched in April 2022. Logica combines Valo’s artificial-intelligence-driven computational platform, called Opal, with Charles River’s preclinical drug development expertise, the partners said.While not divulging too many details, we do know that this platform has initially identified a target for \"different forms of lupus,\" according to the release. This disease is primarily treated with off-label drugs or newer meds in the form of GSK\'s Benlysta and AstraZeneca\'s Saphnelo. The most common form of the disease is systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), with other forms including lupus nephritis. There are already other pharmas vying for a bite of the lupus market, including Biogen\'s experimental litifilimab as well as AbbVie’s blockbuster immunology drug Rinvoq, which is in phase 3 testing for SLE, and Bristol Myers Squibb’s Sotyktu, which presented positive data in SLE at the start of last year. Logica is not limited to any single disease area, Frearson said, with its current portfolio of projects spanning multiple therapeutic areas. When the Charles River, Valo and Pioneering Medicines collaboration was first announced in February 2023, the partners said the goal was to pursue new drug candidates across a variety of targets.“We entered our collaboration with Charles River and Valo with a shared goal of accelerating the drug discovery process, and of expediting the development of critically needed therapies for patients with limited or no treatment options,” Luisa Salter-Cid, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Pioneering Medicines, said in the release. “Logica’s early success in identifying a potential therapy for an autoimmune disease has built confidence in that shared goal.”