Flagship-incubated Repertoire Immune Medicines has lined up an autoimmune disease pact with Bristol Myers Squibb, marking the first major update from the well-funded startup in about two years.
Bristol Myers will dish out $65 million upfront to the Cambridge, MA-based startup as they look to create so-called “tolerizing vaccines” for up to three undisclosed autoimmune diseases. The deal could balloon to $1.8 billion if all milestones are met, the companies said Monday morning.
The partners are betting that the experimental therapies can rebalance a patient’s immune system with “relatively infrequent administration” and replace the need for existing autoimmune treatments, CEO Torben Straight Nissen told Endpoints News in an interview.
The tie-up comes as Bristol Myers slashes about a dozen programs from its internal pipeline. The large drugmaker still seeks external innovation, though, after lining up a series of recent acquisitions across neuroscience, oncology, radiopharmaceuticals and antibody-drug conjugates.
For Repertoire, the deal serves as an external validation for its Decode platform, which outlines the immune synapse, so the biotech can create T cell-targeted therapies. The company has raised more than $350 million from Flagship, Softbank Vision Fund 2, the Alaska Permanent Fund and others.
It last revealed a $189 million Series B in April 2021. Last year, the startup went back to its existing investors to raise a previously undisclosed “small round,” Nissen said. Repertoire declined to disclose how much it raised then and the updated tally of its total funding to date.
The biotech adjusted after the Series B. It entered the clinic with a cell therapy-based modality but terminated that trial in 2022. The early-phase study tested RPTR-168 in patients with certain forms of HPV-positive tumors. Repertoire also reduced its staff by nearly 50% that year.
Since then, the biotech has remained relatively mum.
“We went back in and took a look at the Decode platform as a whole and all the amazing work that the team had done, ” Nissen said, “and looked at that and said, ‘Well, why don’t we try to develop off-the-shelf, scalable medicines using that exact same platform?’”
With Bristol Myers, the startup seeks to create what it dubs “tolerizing vaccines,” which include “an mRNA strand that encodes the disease-relevant epitopes and that’s then encapsulated in [lipid nanoparticles] that’s delivered to the spleen and presented on dendritic cells,” Nissen said.
The collaboration doesn’t include Repertoire’s internal programs in type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis. Nor does it encompass the cancer vaccines and TCR bispecifics that the biotech is creating for various oncology indications.
Repertoire will run research up to candidate nomination. Its pharma partner will then take the lead.