Merck & Co.'s peptides could be undergoing a transformation into oral tablets thanks to a $493 million licensing deal the company inked with Austria-based drug delivery technology maker Cyprumed.
Through the deal, Merck gains nonexclusive global rights to Cyprumed’s oral peptide delivery platform for an undisclosed number of targets, plus the option to exclusively license the tech for other individual targets. In return, Cyprumed could make up to $493 million in upfront, development, regulatory and net sales milestones linked to the potential approval of any products that come out of the collaboration, plus additional payments if Merck exercises the exclusive license option.
Merck will be responsible for the R&D, manufacturing and commercialization of any product that uses the Cyprumed delivery tech under the agreement.
The partnership marks a “significant step” for Cyprumed, CEO Florian Föger, Ph.D., said in an April 15 release, adding that the additional target options are a "great validation" of the company's technology.
Merck, meanwhile, looks forward to working with the biotech to help advance its macrocyclic peptide development efforts, according to Allen Templeton, Ph.D., vice president of pharmaceutical sciences at Merck Research Laboratories.
The tablet formulations that Cyprumed works on offer “superior oral bioavailability” and use already approved drug excipients, helping support scalability, cost efficacy and regulatory compliance, according to Cyprumed. The company says it is collaborating with several pharma partners including Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim and Ferring to “transform peptide therapeutics by providing easy to manufacture, patient-friendly oral dosage forms.”
Merck didn't disclose which peptides could be made into oral formulations.
Recently, the company has been carving out a bigger slot for itself in the peptide space. Early last year, Merck partnered up with Unnatural Products in a $220 million biobucks deal that allows Merck to use Unnatural Products' technology to develop macrocyclic peptide candidates against a “challenging” undisclosed oncology target.
The company previously hailed macrocyclic peptides as “the next wave of drug discovery” thanks to their “Goldilocks” chemical modality, which could be helpful as Merck scientists work to combine the ease of administration that small-molecule drugs offer with the potency and target specificity of an infused or injected antibody, the company wrote in a 2023 article.
One example of a macrocyclic peptide is Merck’s MK-0616, an oral PCSK9 inhibitor the company is evaluating in hypercholesterolemia through a large phase 3 program in collaboration with UCB. Since MK-0616 is already a once-daily pill, that leaves only one other peptide in Merck’s clinical pipeline, a GLP-1/glucagon receptor agonist called efinopegdutide.
Efinopegdutide is a phase 2 candidate for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis that’s being studied as an injection and falls under one of Cyprumed’s focuses of GLP-1 analogues. The Austria-based biotech also works on developing tech platforms for the oral administration of macrocycles and mini-proteins.