Australian company Starpharma has reached another milestone in its partnership with AstraZeneca covering development of its DEP drug delivery technology.
The milestone has triggered a US$2 million milestone payment under Starpharma’s multiproduct DEP license.
"This is the final preclinical milestone prior to advancing the first AZDEP candidate to clinical trials and follows the completion of extensive testing and scale up activities," said the company in a statement.
Under the multiproduct AstraZeneca DEP license, Starpharma is eligible to receive potential development, launch and sales milestones of US$124 million for this AZ DEP product, and US$93.3 million for each subsequent qualifying product. Starpharma also will receive tiered royalties on net sales on the resultant AstraZeneca DEP products.
According to Starpharma CEO, Dr Jackie Fairley, “We are delighted to announce the achievement of this important development milestone by AstraZeneca triggering the further payment. Both parties are extremely impressed by how well the DEP candidate is performing and we look forward to seeing this initial compound advance to the clinic. What’s particularly gratifying is the advancing AstraZeneca DEP candidate provides further validation of the utility and consistent performance of the DEP®platform, which we also see in other partner programs and our expanding internal programs”.
"Achievement of this important development milestone is indicative of the success we have seen in our DEP program in partnership with Starpharma," said Dr Susan Galbraith, SVP, Head of the Oncology Innovative Medicines Unit at AstraZeneca. "It is a highly productive collaboration and the DEP technology has enabled us to advance a very exciting novel oncology agent towards the clinic. We’re continuing to investigate the potential of DEP more broadly across molecules within our oncology portfolio.’’