Frontier Medicines Announces Milestone Payment in AbbVie Partnership, Following Advancement of Lead Candidates Targeting a Historically Undruggable Transcription Factor

BOSTON and SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., July 23, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Frontier Medicines Corporation (“Frontier” or the “Company”), a clinical-stage precision medicine company seeking to unlock the proteome to advance transformational therapies against otherwise undruggable disease-causing targets, today announced the advancement of lead candidates for further optimization in an AbbVie partnered program targeting a key transcription factor for cancer cell survival, triggering an accompanying milestone payment.

“By applying the Frontier™ Platform, our team was able to target a historically intractable transcription factor that has implications across oncology treatment,” said Chris Varma, Ph.D., chairman, CEO, and co-founder of Frontier Medicines. “This progress validates our platform’s ability to unlock undruggable targets for small molecule treatment and we look forward to further advances in our collaboration with AbbVie.”

Started in 2020, the objective of the global partnership is to discover, develop, and commercialize a pipeline of innovative small molecule therapeutics against certain high-interest, difficult-to-drug protein targets.  

About Frontier and AbbVie Partnership 

Under the partnership, the companies will collaborate on the research and pre-clinical development of programs directed to novel E3 ligases, and certain immunology and oncology targets. AbbVie will reimburse Frontier’s R&D costs through defined stages of pre-clinical development. Upon successful completion, AbbVie will assume full responsibility for global development and commercialization activities and costs for the programs. Frontier will retain an option to share development activities and expenses for certain oncology programs through the completion of Phase 2. Frontier will be eligible to receive success-based development and commercial milestone payments that could potentially exceed $1 billion, in addition to royalty payments on commercialized products. AbbVie retains the right to expand the collaboration in the future by exercising options to a defined number of additional targets. The collaboration excludes all of Frontier’s internal programs for which Frontier retains exclusive global rights. 

About Frontier Medicines

Frontier Medicines is a clinical stage precision medicine company pioneering groundbreaking medicines to transform treatment for genetically-defined patient populations, starting with oncology and immunology. Our proprietary chemoproteomics powered drug discovery engine, the Frontier™ Platform, leverages covalent chemistry and machine learning to unlock hard-to-treat disease causing proteins for drug development. Today, we are advancing a diversified pipeline of wholly-owned precision medicines against the most important drivers of cancer and high-value immunology programs. Our lead candidate, FMC-376, is a dual inhibitor of ON+OFF KRASG12C. FMC-376 is a potential best-in-class therapy designed to completely block both forms of the KRAS mutation to overcome the lack of response and resistance seen with single-acting KRASG12C inhibitors. For more information, please visit www.frontiermeds.com. Follow Frontier on LinkedIn.

Frontier Medicines Contact:
Victoria Fort
SVP, Strategy and Corporate Affairs
Victoria.Fort@frontiermeds.com
202.361.0445