Spend nearly 300 million US dollars!

Recently, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) exercised its option and signed a global exclusive license agreement for EVT8683 with Evotec SE, which comes from a more extensive neurodegenerative disease cooperation alliance between the two parties
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EVT8683 is a small molecule drug targeting key cell stress response.

According to the terms of the license agreement, BMS will lead further development and commercialization
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Evotec will receive an option payment of US$20 million and is eligible for milestone payments of up to US$250 million, as well as royalties

EVT8683 originated from Evotec's phenotypic screening using its leading iPSC (induced pluripotent stem cell) drug discovery platform, and achieved IND filing approval in just 5 years
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According to the option agreement signed with Xinji (now BMS) in 2016, BMS has the right to choose this additional project in the neurodegenerative disease cooperation

In terms of neurodegeneration, currently approved drugs can only provide short-term symptomatic treatment for disease symptoms.
There is still a huge medical need that has not been met for innovative therapies to slow down and reverse disease progression
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The BMS-Evotec Neurodegenerative Cooperative Alliance is established on Evotec’s industrialized iPSC platform, using patient-derived disease models to discover and screen potential disease modification methods for neurodegenerative diseases
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Evotec's iPSC platform allows high-throughput screening of iPSC-based human disease models combined with unbiased transcriptome analysis

Only 4.
5 years after initiating the partnership, BMS now exercises its option to sign a global license agreement for EVT8683
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The target of the EVT8683 project is a key cellular stress response mechanism, and has shown very convincing preclinical efficacy and safety, and has the potential to provide disease-modifying treatments for a variety of destructive neurodegenerative diseases

Induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) is a kind of pluripotent stem cell that can be directly generated from adult cells and has a bright future in the medical field
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By developing candidate drugs in disease models established directly from cells obtained from patients, it is hoped that a new generation of more effective drugs will be obtained, so as to bring better prognosis for patients with neurodegenerative diseases

In August of this year, BMS also exercised its option to obtain an immune system modulator from Exscientia, an artificial intelligence drug developer.

Some analysts pointed out that the new base, focusing on cancer and inflammatory diseases, seems to have brought a large number of open-ended discovery transactions, and is continuously bringing new assets to the BMS pipeline