Flagship Pioneering Announces Two New Agreements with Ampersand Biomedicines and Montai Therapeutics Under its Strategic Partnership with Pfizer

PRNewswire 20-Nov-2024 6:30 AM

Ampersand's AND™ Platform will be used to identify programmed biologics for the
treatment of obesity-related targets

Montai's CONECTA™ AI platform will be used to identify small molecules directed to a
potential Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer-related target  

Collaborations will leverage Pfizer's deep expertise in early discovery and development
for cardiometabolic and cancer treatments, two priority therapeutic areas for the
company

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 20, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Flagship Pioneering, the bioplatform innovation company, today announced  Ampersand Biomedicines and Montai Therapeutics have entered into agreements to identify targeted molecules that could potentially be further developed as treatments for obesity and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), two priority disease areas for Pfizer. These agreements represent the most recent collaborations initiated under Flagship's strategic partnership with Pfizer Inc. (Pfizer) announced in July 2023 and will leverage Pfizer's deep expertise in early discovery and development for new targeted therapies.

"These two new collaborations will separately leverage the pioneering bioplatform technologies of Ampersand and Montai to perform research, which may lead to future opportunities to develop new therapies in areas of critical unmet need," said Paul Biondi, Flagship Pioneering General Partner and President of Pioneering Medicines. "With four Flagship-founded companies now actively working with our Pioneering Medicines team to advance research activities under our partnership with Pfizer, we are demonstrating how this Innovation Supply Chain Partnership could enable more rapid innovation by uniting Flagship's ecosystem of diverse bioplatforms with Pfizer's disease and therapeutic development expertise to bring about breakthroughs in drug development."

The agreements with Ampersand Biomedicines and Montai Therapeutics follow previously announced agreements with ProFound Therapeutics and Quotient Therapeutics, marking continued momentum for the partnership. Pioneering Medicines, Flagship's in house drug discovery and development unit, is responsible for leading Flagship's partnership with Pfizer, including driving the exploration process to rapidly surface potential drug discovery and research programs built on Flagship's diverse bioplatforms and modalities.

"Pfizer has deep expertise in cardiometabolic health and cancer drug discovery," said Charlotte Allerton, Head of Discovery and Early Development, Pfizer. "We believe that Ampersand's innovative platform and the computational tools of Montai have the potential to unlock novel approaches to targets in these areas of significant unmet need. We aim to utilize these unique approaches to drive the next wave of breakthroughs for patients."

Creating next-generation programmable medicines for the treatment of obesity

Ampersand is using its computationally-powered Address, Navigate, Determine (AND)™ Platform to program biologic medicines that work only where needed in the body and nowhere else. These AND-Body™ Therapeutics are designed to effectively target the site of disease without affecting healthy tissue or cells. As a part of the Flagship-Pfizer partnership, Ampersand will leverage its AND Platform to target tissue-selective metabolic pathways, offering a potent approach to potentially improve metabolic health.

"AND-Body Therapeutics represent a new type of programmable biologic that have a significantly improved therapeutic index when compared to non-targeted medicines, making them an attractive modality to address new targets for the treatment of obesity," said Jason Gardner, CEO of Ampersand Biomedicines and CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering. "This collaboration represents one of many potential applications of our platform in obesity and beyond. We look forward to exploring the potential for AND-Body Therapeutics to improve metabolic health."

Exploring the potential of Anthromolecules^™ as a privileged starting point for a potential small molecule therapeutic for lung cancer

Montai's CONECTA platform integrates leading edge computational tools to decode links between hard-to-drug biological pathways and novel small molecule solutions from an untapped source of diverse human-qualified chemistry called Anthromolecules™. Montai has curated a library of more than 100 million Anthromolecules and their derivatives, whose topologically rich chemical structures are largely distinct from areas mined for conventional drug discovery. These molecules from traditional medicines, foods, and their metabolites possess fundamental scaffolds evolved to offer far greater precision and selectivity to engage biological pathways that drive chronic disease with a broad range of molecular modalities. As part of the Flagship-Pfizer partnership, Montai will deploy its CONECTA platform against oncogenic mechanisms that drive cancer cell growth and survival in order to identify new small molecules with the potential to be further developed as therapies for lung cancer.

"Montai's diverse chemistry, combined with our deep pathway network understanding, makes us uniquely positioned to pursue important immune system regulators in inflammation, autoimmune diseases and certain cancers, but have historically eluded small molecule drug developers," said Margo Georgiadis, Co-founder and CEO of Montai and CEO-Partner, Flagship Pioneering. "We look forward to exploring how CONECTA's integrated chemistry-biology approach can precision match novel small molecules that interfere with cancer cell's intrinsic mechanisms to inhibit tumor growth, with the ultimate goal of developing a potential therapeutic for patients suffering with lung cancer."

About Flagship Pioneering and Pioneering Medicines

Flagship Pioneering invents and builds bioplatform companies, each with the potential for multiple products that transform human health or sustainability. Since its launch in 2000, Flagship has originated and fostered more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in more than $60 billion in aggregate value. Flagship is operating with $14 billion of assets under management as of its latest capital raise, announced in July 2024. The current Flagship ecosystem comprises over 40 companies, including Foghorn Therapeutics (NASDAQ:FHTX), Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA), Omega Therapeutics (NASDAQ:OMGA), Sana Biotechnology (NASDAQ:SANA), Generate Biomedicines, Inari, Indigo Agriculture, and Tessera Therapeutics.

Pioneering Medicines, Flagship Pioneering's in house drug development unit, is dedicated to conceiving and developing a broad portfolio of life-changing treatments for patients built from Flagship's innovative platforms. Harnessing the drug development expertise of its team together with the power of Flagship's multiple scientific platforms, Pioneering Medicines explores and identifies new product concepts which are then advanced jointly with Flagship's bioplatform companies. Within Flagship's Innovation Supply Chain partnerships, Pioneering Medicines works with external collaborators to apply its unique approach to partners' R&D priorities. These partnerships are highly co-creative strategic alliances that accelerate therapeutic innovation by bringing together partners spanning the full spectrum of drug discovery, development, and production.

About Ampersand Biomedicines

Ampersand Biomedicines enables a new way of programming medicines that work precisely where needed in the body and nowhere else. The company's computationally powered Address, Navigate, Determine (AND)™ Platform identifies ideal addresses for drug localization and informs the design of AND-Body™ Therapeutics that have the optimal therapeutic effect. The result is smarter biologic medicines that target the site of disease without affecting healthy tissue or cells. Ampersand Biomedicines was founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2021. For more information, please visit www.ampersand.bio.

About Montai Therapeutics

Montai is harnessing AI to decode untapped diverse chemistry to develop breakthrough oral medicines to address unmet patient needs across chronic disease. Montai's CONECTA™ platform has built the world's leading foundation models for decoding the complex language between nature's vast bioactive chemistry and human biology. CONECTA's curated collection of over 100M Anthromolecules™ and Anthrologs™ offers a privileged starting point for drug development by unlocking efficient access to vast untapped structural diversity with potential to modulate complex biology with greater precision and selectivity, and to molecules with 1000s of years of validated human consumption history in food, herbs and traditional medicines. CONECTA's foundation models enable it to efficiently train machine learning models to precision match, prioritize, and optimize candidates from diverse chemistry to solve complex biological pathways – supercharging expert biologists and drug developers with unprecedented optionality and predictability in drug discovery. With an initial focus on inflammation and immunology, Montai is developing a broad pipeline of first in class oral medicines to replace biologics and solve hard-to-drug targets such as transcription factors. Montai was founded in Flagship Labs in 2019. For more information, please visit www.montai.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

Media Contact

Press@flagshippioneering.com 

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