Morphic Therapeutic Secures Up to $725 Million from Johnson & Johnson to Advance Oral Integrin Therapies Globally

VCBeat (WeChat Official Account: vcbeat) has learned that Johnson & Johnson entered into an agreement with Morphic Therapeutic on February 21, 2019, becoming a partner for Morphic Therapeutic’s new initiative, Morphic Treatment, and its small-molecule integrin platform. Johnson & Johnson committed to providing up to $725 million in funding for the project.

According to Praveen Tipirneni, President and CEO of Morphic Therapeutic, the deal also includes an undisclosed upfront payment. Combined with the $100 million agreement signed with pharmaceutical giant AbbVie last October and the $80 million Series B financing closed last month, this means that Morphic Therapeutic is now “well-capitalized to advance clinical trials.” Previously, the company also received investments from Pfizer Inc. and the prominent healthcare investment firm Novo Holdings A/S.

Morphic Therapeutic is a small, private biotechnology company based in Waltham, Massachusetts. Its founder, Timothy Springer, is a professor at Harvard Medical School. The company’s prominence in the field of small-molecule integrin-targeted therapeutics stems from his pioneering work; he was the first to discover that integrin receptors can exist in multiple conformational states. Morphic Therapeutic, founded by Timothy Springer, primarily develops oral therapies targeting integrins.

This research and development agreement will focus on several undisclosed integrin candidate drugs. Morphic Therapeutic and Johnson & Johnson plan to conduct preclinical testing on these candidates, which are designed to modulate integrin function through activation or inhibition.

Securing funding and expertise from Johnson & Johnson enables Morphic Therapeutic to strengthen its exploration of existing therapeutic platforms, expanding its scope to cover 24 known integrin cell-surface receptors involved in diverse cellular functions, including cell differentiation, intratissue cell migration, and cell survival. Furthermore, as Morphic Therapeutic has thus far focused exclusively on integrin inhibitors, extending its efforts to include activators could unlock a entirely new suite of targeted indications for research.

“The loss of integrin-mediated interactions with the microenvironment leads to impaired cellular function or even cell death, ultimately resulting in organ failure,” said Praveen Tipirneni. “However, correcting these defects through integrin activators holds promise for restoring organ function in various therapeutic areas.”

Aberrant integrin signaling can lead to a variety of human diseases, including organ fibrosis (a key focus of AbbVie’s research) as well as autoimmune disorders such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, and cancer. Early oral inhibitors often resulted in compound activation rather than target blockade, leading to the failure of multiple candidates and adverse effects in humans.

“Supported by proprietary integrin structural data, Morphic Therapeutic has designed candidate products that we believe will not present this issue, and has also generated preclinical data to support this hypothesis,” added Praveen Tipirneni, who expects Morphic Therapeutic’s R&D department to release its first clinical-stage candidate product this year.

Currently, several integrin inhibitors have been launched on the market, but they are typically administered via injection rather than as small-molecule oral agents. These injectable therapies cover a wide range of diseases, from inflammatory bowel disease to multiple sclerosis and dry eye disease. Under the agreement between Morphic Therapeutic and Johnson & Johnson, the two companies will collaborate through clinical trials to identify and advance candidate drugs. Upon completion of the research studies, Johnson & Johnson may license these drugs and will be responsible for their global clinical development and commercialization.

(Compiled by Ning Chen)