Roche and Aileron Therapeutics have entered into a collaboration to discover, develop and commercialize a new class of drugs called Stapled Peptide Therapeutics. As part of this agreement, Roche will work with Aileron to develop drug candidates against up to five undisclosed targets selected from Roche’s key therapeutic areas, which include oncology, virology, inflammation, metabolism and CNS.

Stapled Peptide Therapeutics are a result of Aileron’s breakthrough peptide stabilization technology, and are a potential solution to drug as-yet intractable disease targets, including those originating from long sought-after intracellular protein-protein interactions.

Under the terms of the agreement, Roche will provide Aileron guaranteed funding of at least $25 million in technology access fees and R&D support. Aileron is eligible to receive up to $1.1 billion in payments upon the achievement of discovery, development, regulatory and commercialisation milestones, if drug candidates are developed against all five targets. In addition, Aileron will receive royalties on future sales for any marketed products that result from the collaboration. Aileron will have substantial responsibility in collaboration with Roche to develop drug candidates against the selected targets up to clinical development.

“Roche is dedicated to advancing innovative therapies, and Stapled Peptides represent a potentially transformative new technology to create drugs for important disease targets that are intractable to currently available modalities,” said Jean-Jacques Garaud, Global Head of Roche Pharma Research and Early Development. “This collaboration with Aileron is a strategically important endeavour for advancing a novel approach to developing new medicines and will accelerate our progress toward our ultimate goal of bringing important new treatments to patients with unmet medical needs.” “This alliance with Roche validates the broad potential for our Stapled Peptide platform across multiple therapeutic areas and classes of targets and also provides Aileron with capital to advance our platform and internal drug development pipeline,” said Joseph A.

Yanchik, III, President and CEO of Aileron. “We took our time to carefully consider several opportunities for our first industry collaboration, and believe that Roche is an ideal partner for Aileron because of its history with peptide therapeutics and its commitment to tackling difficult disease targets.”