South San Francisco-based Nodality has spent five years honing an enabling technology for personalized medicine, which could help patients avoid wasteful treatments and improve the success rate in new drug R&D. Now it has persuaded New York-based Pfizer (NYSE: [[ticker:PFE]]), the world’s biggest drugmaker, to buy into its vision.
Nodality, which raised $15 million of venture capital last month from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, TPG Biotech, Maverick Capital and Pfizer Ventures, has struck an important new collaboration with Pfizer to come up with better drugs for autoimmune diseases. Terms of the alliance aren’t being disclosed, but instead of typical diagnostic industry fee-for-service contract terms, the deal is structured more like a small biotech/ Big Pharma drug partnership, says Dan Dornbusch, Nodality’s vice president of business development. The multi-year deal provides Nodality with upfront cash, and the potential for milestone payments based on success in development. Besides helping Pfizer pick the right patients for clinical trials, Nodality also could end up developing companion diagnostic products that help doctors do a better job selecting the right drug for the right patient in real-world use.
The new deal with Pfizer is the second major pharma partnership Nodality has inked this year, following one it formed in February with Belgium-based UCB. It’s the latest vote of confidence in Nodality’s technology approach, which uses high-speed cell counting machines, called flow cytometers, to look at tissue samples from individual patients. That process gives Nodality a window into specific patterns in the biological pathways of a diseased tissue, giving doctors a more detailed idea of what’s going wrong at the molecular level. Information like that, the thinking goes, ought to help physicians select the best drug or combination of drugs that is more likely to work for an individual patient.
For Pfizer, the interest in such technology is clear. Autoimmune diseases, in which the immune goes haywire and attacks healthy tissue as if it were an invading pathoge, tend to cause chronic pain, fatigue, and disability. Scientists don’t know what causes most of these conditions, don’t know how to diagnose them very well, and don’t know how to select patients likely to benefit in the clinic. There have been a few big successes in treating autoimmunity—Abbott Laboratories’ adalimumab (Humira) recently dethroned Pfizer’s atortastatin (Lipitor) as the world’s top-selling prescription drug—but many autoimmune conditions lack effective treatments, prompting Pfizer and other Big Pharma companies to pour billions of dollars into autoimmune R&D. There are an estimated 14 million to 24 million patients in the U.S. alone with autoimmune disorders, according to the National Institutes of Health.
The Nodality/Pfizer collaboration will specifically focus on one autoimmune condition, lupus, in the beginning. The plan is to seek to understand the way various drug candidates work, and how they might match up with the underlying biology of the disease from patient to patient.
“We think this collaboration will generate novel insights into how the disease works, which will let Pfizer develop their current products, and open up some new pathways, some new therapeutic targets, and new ways to treat lupus,” Nodality’s Dornbusch says. “For us, it will generate a large amount of knowledge on how the disease works, so we can more efficiently develop products.”
Pfizer’s Jose-Carlos Gutierrez-Ramos, the company’s senior vice president of biotherapeutics R&D, said in a statement that, “Our partnership with Nodality exemplifies Pfizer’s commitment to Precision Medicine by providing us with earlier insight into a compound’s potential clinical profile, which can help reduce attrition rates, accelerate development and improve patient targeting. There is a tremendous patient need for new medicines that can impact the pathophysiology of autoimmune diseases.”
Nodality currently has about 40 employees, and expects to hire
