Flagship Pioneering’s ProFound Therapeutics is keeping its string of high-profile partnerships going, forging a pact with the Gates Foundation worth up to $35 million to find new drug targets for a dangerous pregnancy complication.
ProFound will receive an initial tranche of $20 million, with a further $15 million available if certain experimental milestones are met.
Under the terms of the deal, the biotech will use its vast repository of proteomics data to scour tissue from placentas for potential biomarkers and drug targets for preeclampsia, a disease of high blood pressure during pregnancy that can ultimately be fatal for mother or child if not addressed.
“It's a very significant cause of both maternal and fetal death, particularly in the developing world, where there's not acute care opportunities,” ProFound CEO John Lepore, M.D., told Fierce. “The Gates Foundation has a strong interest in ameliorating that horrendous situation. The problem is, despite being common, hardly anything is known about the pathogenesis.”
ProFound has amassed a library of proteins from the so-called “dark proteome” that are impossible to detect with traditional techniques. By comparing placentas from women with and without preeclampsia, the company plans to identify fruitful areas of future drug development.
Once targets are identified, Lepore explained, ProFound will use an agentic AI tool to suss out their functions before validating those predictions using lab experiments.
“With only about 1% of global healthcare R&D directed toward female-specific conditions beyond cancer, promising treatments can take over a decade to reach the women who need them most,” Herbert Virgin, M.D., Ph.D., head of the Gates Foundation’s AI-Enabled Cures Frontier Accelerator, said in an Aug. 27 release.
The collaboration originated with a conversation between Lepore and Virgin about a year ago, Lepore told Fierce, when the pair realized that ProFound’s platform and the foundation’s AI approach complement each other well.
From there, preeclampsia “jumped off the page” as an area to pursue, the CEO said, with significant unmet need and biological tissue that is readily available for study.
Since its launch in 2022, ProFound has formed a roster of pharma partners that includes Novartis, Pfizer and GSK. Lepore said there’s still room for more partners to join the party while ProFound continues to develop its internal programs, which remain tightly under wraps.
“A core part of our strategy is to pick things that we want to do really well and focus on internally and augment that with what we partner with pharma and, in this case, a foundation,” Lepore said.
A key focus for ProFound’s internal pipeline is oncology, he added, where the biotech has unearthed “a fascinating and I think very important set of novel proteins” that are “unique to cancer and targetable.”