Merck Dangles $1.1 Billion For Cerevance To Discover New Targets For Alzheimer’s

Merck (known as MSD outside the United States and Canada) and Cambridge, UK-based Cerevance have begun a multi-year partnership worth over $1.1 billion to discover new targets for Alzheimer’s disease. 

The deal with Cerevance includes an upfront payment of $25 million from Merck, with $1.1 billion in milestone payments dependent on Cerevance’s ability to find new targets with its NETSseq platform. Cerevance is also out-licensing one discovery-stage program to Merck as part of the collaboration. 

Related article: Doctor Tailoring Cognitive Therapies for Patient Personalization Wins Grand Prize

Let’s Seek With NETSseq

Cerevance’s Nuclear Enriched Transcript Sort sequencing technology platform was invented by Nat Heintz and Xiao Xu at Rockefeller University, and profiles brain cell types in mature human brain tissue. 

The approach involves using antibodies against proteins found in the nucleus, endoplasmic reticulum and membrane, as well as RNA probes against cell-type-specific transcripts. Using fluorescence-based techniques, NETSseq quantifies gene expression levels in the targeted cell type, which could be a neuron or glial cell. 

The platform has been used to analyze cell populations in thousands of living, diseased, and post-mortem brain tissue. Cerevance hopes that the analyses can expose biological pathways underlying neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. 

The company’s lead pipeline candidate CVN424 is an oral, non-dopaminergic compound that acts on a new target, GPR6, and has shown efficacy in a Phase 2 study in Parkinson’s disease. 

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Joy Lin

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