One of Germany’s largest drugmakers is partnering with a Southeast Asian company to develop drugs for fibrotic diseases.
Boehringer Ingelheim, a privately owned company based in Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany, said Thursday that it had partnered with Singapore-based Enleofen Bio to develop the latter’s preclinical drugs targeting IL-11. The deal enables Enleofen to receive more than $1 billion per product in upfront payments and milestones from the German drugmaker.
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Enleofen’s lead product candidate – in studies to enable the company to seek regulatory approval to move it into the clinic – is ENx108A an antibody that targets IL-11 and has been shown preclinically to reverse organ dysfunction by targeting fibrosis and inflammation. Other product candidates include ENx203 and ENx209, as well as what the company labels second-generation therapeutics. IL-11 belongs to a class of proteins known as cytokines. Blocking it has been shown to inhibit diseases affecting several organs, including the liver, lungs, retina and heart, among others.
Areas of focus for Enleofen include the fatty liver disease nonalcoholic steatohepatitis and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Founded in 2017, the company was spun out of the National Heart Centre Singapore at SingHealth and Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School, under the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre.
“The impressive preclinical studies at Enleofen have revealed the potential of IL-11 blockade to treat a broad range of diseases,” Boehringer Ingelheim global head of discovery research Clive Wood said in a statement. “We are excited to have these monoclonal antibodies in our pipeline and have the opportunity to accelerate their path to many patients whose needs are not met by current treatments.”
NASH in particular has become an increasing area of focus for many companies, given its growth alongside the rise in obesity and Type 2 diabetes and the current lack of approved drug therapies. Boehringer Ingelheim has been active in drug development in the disease, though with mixed results: Last month, it discontinued NASH development of the drug BI 1467335 due to concerns about drug interactions. Others, like Gilead Sciences, have had less luck in developing NASH drugs. The drug with the most potential to become the first to win Food and Drug Administration approval for NASH is Intercept Pharmaceuticals’ obeticholic acid, which is up for approval this year.
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