Seven months after pressing pause on its plans for its PKMYT1 inhibitor, Repare Therapeutics has found a partner to take the cancer drug forward.
Back in January, Repare abandoned phase 3 plans to evaluate the candidate, called lunresertib, in combination with its ATR inhibitor camonsertib for platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. While the biotech continued to assess lunresertib in combination with Debiopharm’s WEE1 inhibitor as part of a collaboration, Repare said at the time that it would halt other plans to develop lunresertib unless a partner can be found.
That partner has finally appeared in the form of Debiopharm, which will pay $10 million upfront for the rights to lunresertib. Under the deal, Repare will also be in line for a further $5 million in near-term payments, as well as up to $257 million in potential clinical, regulatory, commercial and sales milestones, and single-digit royalties on sales.
Debiopharm will also take over the ongoing study of lunresertib with its WEE1 inhibitor, dubbed Debio 0123.
“Based on very promising phase 1/1b clinical data, we believe the combination of lunresertib and Debio 0123 is highly synergistic and could potentially drive rapid and deep tumor regressions,” Debiopharm CEO Bertrand Ducrey said in a July 15 post-market release. “We believe the synthetic lethality approach of lunresertib in combination with Debio 0123 will allow us to bring this innovative precision therapy to patients with difficult-to-treat cancers.”
Following two rounds of pipeline prioritizations in a year, Repare reaffirmed this morning that it is focused on a pair of phase 1 trials for its PLK4 inhibitor RP-1664 and the Polθ ATPase inhibitor RP-3467. RP-1664 is currently being evaluated as a monotherapy in adult and adolescent patients with TRIM37-high solid tumors.
Meanwhile, Repare is assessing RP-3467 alone and in combination with Lynparza in patients with ovarian cancer, breast cancer, castration-resistant prostate cancer and pancreatic adenocarcinoma, with a readout penciled in for the third quarter.
“This agreement builds upon the success of Repare and Debiopharm’s existing collaboration studying the combination of lunresertib and Debio 0123,” Repare’s CEO Steve Forte said in the same release.
“Our recent business development efforts have continued to enable Repare to focus on the advancement of our clinical priorities and sustained value creation,” Forte added. “We remain focused on two ongoing phase 1 clinical trials with readouts expected in the second half of 2025: the LIONS trial evaluating our RP-1664 PLK4 inhibitor and the POLAR trial evaluating our RP-3467 Polθ ATPase inhibitor.”