Frontier Medicines Receives Milestone Payment from AbbVie After Advancing Lead Candidates

BOSTON and SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., July 23, 2024 — Frontier Medicines Corporation, a clinical-stage precision medicine company, is advancing its lead candidates for further optimization in a program partnered with AbbVie. This program focuses on targeting a key transcription factor essential for cancer cell survival, resulting in a milestone payment for the company.

Chris Varma, Ph.D., chairman, CEO, and co-founder of Frontier Medicines, stated, "By applying our Frontier™ Platform, our team successfully targeted a historically challenging transcription factor with implications in oncology treatment.” He emphasized that this progress validates the platform's potential to address previously undruggable targets and expressed optimism about future advances in collaboration with AbbVie.

The collaboration between Frontier Medicines and AbbVie began in 2020 with the goal of discovering, developing, and commercializing small molecule therapeutics for difficult-to-drug protein targets. This global partnership aims to create a pipeline of innovative treatments.

Under this partnership, both companies collaborate on the research and pre-clinical development of programs targeting novel E3 ligases, as well as specific immunology and oncology targets. AbbVie agrees to cover Frontier’s R&D expenses through defined stages of pre-clinical development. Upon successful completion of these stages, AbbVie will take over full responsibility for global development, commercialization activities, and associated costs for the programs. Frontier has the option to share development activities and expenses for certain oncology programs until the end of Phase 2 clinical trials.

Frontier Medicines will be eligible to receive development and commercial milestone payments, which could potentially exceed $1 billion. Additionally, the company stands to gain royalty payments from any commercialized products. AbbVie retains the option to expand the collaboration by targeting a set number of additional targets. However, the partnership excludes all internal programs of Frontier, for which Frontier maintains exclusive global rights.

Frontier Medicines specializes in creating transformative treatments for genetically-defined patient populations, particularly in the fields of oncology and immunology. Their proprietary Frontier™ Platform uses chemoproteomics powered by covalent chemistry and machine learning to develop drugs targeting hard-to-treat, disease-causing proteins. The company is advancing a diversified pipeline of precision medicines.

Their lead candidate, FMC-376, is a dual inhibitor of ON+OFF KRASG12C, designed to block both forms of the KRAS mutation. This approach aims to overcome the resistance and lack of response observed with single-acting KRASG12C inhibitors, positioning FMC-376 as a potential best-in-class therapy.

Frontier Medicines continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in precision medicine, aiming to provide new solutions for unmet medical needs in oncology and immunology.