Achievement of first milestone triggers payment to Frontier

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- Frontier Medicines Corporation, a precision medicine company seeking to unlock the proteome to advance breakthroughs against otherwise undruggable disease-causing targets, today announced the first target for the development of a small molecule inhibitor is advancing into the lead generation phase under the company’s global partnership with AbbVie. 

The global partnership was established in December 2020 to discover, develop, and commercialize a pipeline of innovative small molecule therapeutics against certain high-interest, difficult-to-drug protein targets.

“AbbVie’s partnership with Frontier continues to advance our ongoing efforts and strategic focus on difficult-to-drug protein targets," said Jonathon Sedgwick, Ph.D., vice president and global head, Discovery Research, AbbVie. “We are encouraged by the potential of this technology to validate and drug previously inaccessible biology, with the ultimate aim of developing new medicines to treat patients with debilitating or life-threatening disease.”

Chris Varma, Ph.D., Frontier’s co-founder, chairman, and CEO, added, “The rapid advancement of our first collaboration program against a very important but historically intractable target is a testament to the uniqueness of our platform technologies, bringing together chemoproteomics, covalent chemistry, and machine learning, as well as the expertise of our scientific team. We are pleased to have achieved this first milestone, and we look forward to continued progress with this program and others through the productive collaboration with AbbVie.”

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 precision medicine company that has pioneered a powerful discovery and development platform designed to generate medicines against disease-causing proteins previously considered undruggable. The company is deploying its technologies in chemoproteomics, covalent drug discovery, and machine learning to potentially develop groundbreaking medicines for genetically-defined patient populations, starting in cancer. Frontier is advancing its wholly-owned pipeline of precision medicines against the most important drivers of cancer. The company’s lead program is focused on KRAS^G12C and is distinct in that it targets direct inhibition of both the activated and inactive forms of KRAS^G12C. This KRAS mutation is found most prevalently in patients with non-small cell lung, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. For more information on how Frontier is boldly advancing science to defeat disease, visit www.frontiermeds.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About AbbVie

AbbVie's mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people's lives across several key therapeutic areas: immunology, oncology, neuroscience, eye care, virology, women's health and gastroenterology, in addition to products and services across its Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com. Follow @abbvie on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.