Isis Pharmaceuticals Adds More Deals to Partnership Portfolio

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Isis Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: [[ticker:ISIS]]) has long followed a strategy of spreading its broad drug development program (the company lists 21 drugs in clinical trials) among a variety of pharmaceutical partners. It’s a strategy that enables Isis to generate a diverse stream of revenue from license fees, milestone payments, royalties, profit-sharing, and other payments, while optimizing its focus and efficiency in drug development.

This week the Carlsbad, CA, biopharmaceutical added a few more partnership deals to its portfolio, landing $31 million in nearly immediate payments from AstraZeneca (along with unspecified milestone payments, licensing fees, and royalties in the future) and a three-drug deal with Biogen Idec that includes a $30 million upfront payment and potential future payments totaling $600 million.

In the deal with Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec, which was unveiled Monday, Isis and Biogen agreed to discover and develop antisense drugs against three undisclosed targets for neurological or neuromuscular disorders. The two already are collaborating under previous deals to jointly develop antisense drugs to treat spinal muscular atrophy and myotonic dystrophy type 1.

Isis disclosed its newest collaboration yesterday. The Carlsbad biotech has partnered with London-based AstraZeneca, to discover and develop antisense drugs against five cancer targets, including a drug in early clinical trial that Isis has been evaluating for advanced lymphomas.

Isis specializes in antisense therapies, developing drugs that target the proteins produced by mutated genes that are responsible in certain types of disease. The idea is to synthesize a strand of nucleic acid that binds to the gene’s messenger RNA (mRNA), which blocks that gene’s protein production.

The synthesized nucleic acid is termed an “antisense” oligonucleotide because its base sequence is exactly complementary—and binds—to the “sense” sequence of the gene’s mRNA. In effect, the antisense technology, like the refrain of a 1984 song from the Talking Heads, tells the gene to “Stop making sense, stop making sense.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.