GSK and Muna Therapeutics have announced a research alliance to identify and validate novel drug targets for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. As part of this joint effort, the companies will rely on Muna’s MiND-MAP platform to derive insights from spatial transcriptomics.
Muna Therapeutics will receive €33.5 million upfront, and up to €140 million per target in milestone payments, as well as tiered royalties on net sales. This will enable the company to continue expanding the technology platform and employ it to identify and validate new drug targets for Alzheimer’s disease.
The terms of the deal give GSK the option for the discovery and development of new drugs against multiple validated targets identified by the MiND-MAP platform. The big pharma will lead drug development activities and be responsible for preclinical and clinical development as well as manufacturing and commercialization of any drug candidates resulting from the targets discovered and validated throughout the collaboration.
“Our agreement marks a pivotal moment in Muna’s evolution and in the broader Alzheimer’s research landscape,” said Rita Balice-Gordon, Chief Executive Officer of Muna Therapeutics. “By combining GSK’s commitment to breakthrough science with our MiND-MAP platform’s ability to deliver novel insights into brain resilience, we aim to transform the landscape of drug discovery for neurodegenerative diseases and bring new hope to millions of patients worldwide.”
Muna and GSk will employ the MiND-MAP platform to study postmortem brain samples from Alzheimer’s disease patients, cognitively resilient individuals, healthy controls, and centenarians with and without cognitive impairment. Muna will leverage its expertise in spatial transcriptomics and mapping the brain’s response to pathological protein aggregates linked to neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, with the goal of identifying cellular mechanisms, gene networks, and molecular interactions that provide enhanced cognitive resilience.
“By applying spatial multi-omics to unique patient phenotypes, Muna’s MiND-MAP platform is able to determine the genetic and cellular basis of progression and resilience in neurodegenerative diseases,” said Kaivan Khavandi, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Respiratory/Immunology R&D at GSK.
“The alliance exemplifies our discovery ethos, to utilize advanced data and platform tech to identify high-confidence, human-data-derived, causal targets, which we can support with GSK’s scale and expertise in clinical development and commercialization, to bring desperately needed new therapeutic solutions in Alzheimer’s disease.”