GSK has handed over $45 million upfront to fellow London-based firm Relation to help the pharma identify new targets for fibrotic diseases and osteoarthritis.
The two-stranded collaboration will see Relation use its disease data sets and the biotech’s “Lab-in-the-Loop” platform to find new targets by drawing upon human genetics, single-cell multi-omics from human tissue, assays and machine learning.
GSK is handing over $45 million now—including an equity investment of $15 million—with the potential for success-based collaboration payments of up to $63 million and then up to $200 million in milestone payments per target.
Relation will take the lead on observational studies to produce two functional disease data sets before using its platform to pinpoint specific targets. GSK will develop and commercialize any resulting drugs, with Relation in line for tiered royalties should these candidates make it to market, according to a Dec. 10 release.
“Working with Relation enables us to gain deep and precise insights into human causal biology and apply these to therapeutic discovery through a data-driven approach, supported by Relation’s proprietary platform,” Kaivan Khavandi, Ph.D., senior vice president and global head of respiratory/immunology R&D at GSK, said in the release.
“The resulting targets will be supported by robust translational packages, which will in turn provide clarity on deployment in early clinical evaluation, ultimately supporting our broader portfolio ambition to develop new medicines for fibrotic diseases and osteoarthritis—where there remains significant unmet medical need,” Khavandi added.
Relation was founded in 2020 by current CEO Charles Roberts along with Chief Operating officer Benjamin Swerner and Chief Innovation Officer Jake Taylor-King, and later that year the company had secured a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The biotech has now amassed over $80 million in investment, been granted access to the U.K.’s most powerful supercomputer, and, by 2023, the company had unveiled osteoporosis as its first indication.
The biotech’s work is centered on its Lab-in-the-Loop platform, which “enables us to build rich maps of disease biology from which we discover novel targets,” according to the company’s website.
“Our approach of generating data directly from patient tissue allows us to build a comprehensive picture of the underlying human disease biology at scale,” Relation CEO David Roblin explained in the Tuesday morning release. “This, combined with our deployment of machine learning, enables us to make unprecedented inferences about how to effectively intervene in disease processes.”
“By combining Relation’s patient-centric discovery platform with GSK’s global scale and expertise, we have the potential to accelerate the development of transformative medicines for patients who have long awaited new therapies,” he added.
Today's deal has echoes of GSK's $37.5 million partnership with Ochre Bio earlier this year to pinpoint the drivers of liver disease. That collaboration involves GSK accessing Ochre’s computational biology, cellular and perfused human organ platforms to generate human liver data sets that can be used to better understand the biology of the liver.