Sanofi has returned to Nurix Therapeutics for another autoimmune candidate, paying $15 million and committing up to $465 million for exclusive rights to a degrader of a once-undruggable transcription factor.
Nurix has landed deals with Sanofi and Gilead and built an internal pipeline on a platform for identifying agents that use E3 ligases to drive the degradation of targets. Sanofi paid $55 million to partner with the biotech in 2019 and handed over a further $22 million to expand the collaboration one year later. Nurix and Sanofi extended the deal again last year to cover a STAT6 degrader.
The latest deal covers a new, previously undisclosed program. Sanofi and Nurix are keeping the target under wraps for now, but Gwenn Hansen, Ph.D., chief scientific officer at the biotech, offered some clues in a statement.
“This high-value target is a transcription factor involved in the regulation of proinflammatory cytokines serving as a central regulator of inflammation response in autoimmune diseases where targeted protein degradation could offer an innovative treatment option,” Hansen said.
Like other developers of protein degraders, Nurix pitches its technology as a way to go after targets that have been considered undruggable, for example, because they lack viable binding sites. Hansen said the company used its platform to identify “novel binders from which we derived a series of targeted protein degraders and stand-alone target binders” for the new Sanofi target.
The $15 million upfront brings the amount Sanofi has paid Nurix to date up to $105 million. That figure could swell in the coming years. Sanofi has agreed to pay up to $465 million in milestones for exclusive rights to the latest program. The potential paydays add to the $1.9 billion that Nurix was eligible for at the end of November. Nurix has the option to co-develop and co-promote the latest candidate in the U.S.
How much Sanofi pays Nurix will depend on the progress of its programs. Nurix plans to give Sanofi the STAT6 development candidate package in the first half of 2025. The Big Pharma has an option to take the candidate through IND-enabling studies and into the clinic.
Partnerships have helped Nurix build a cash cushion that stood at more than $600 million at the end of November. The biotech is using the money to advance a pipeline led by NX-5948, a BTK degrader that is on course to enter trials this year to support approval in chronic lymphocytic leukemia.