ROME & CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- Angelini Pharma, part of the privately owned Angelini Industries, and Quiver Bioscience (“Quiver”), a discovery technology and therapeutics company advancing programs for the treatment of central nervous system (CNS) disorders, announced today that they have entered into a collaboration and licensing agreement to advance novel therapeutics for genetic epilepsies. The collaboration brings together Quiver’s unique drug discovery capabilities, data assets, and AI models with Angelini Pharma’s established expertise in brain health and epilepsy drug development.

Under the terms of the multi-year agreement, Quiver will receive an undisclosed advance payment and support for defined research activities along with additional licensing fees granting Angelini Pharma exclusive access to collaboration-generated data during the research term. Quiver is also eligible to receive additional milestones payments of up to $120 million and additional royalties upon Angelini’s election of drug targets identified through the collaboration.

“The prospects of our collaboration with Quiver Bioscience are very promising,” said Rafal Kaminski, MD, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Angelini Pharma. “The aim is to generate novel scientific insights on a scale and richness that has been unprecedented in this area of research. By applying cutting-edge technologies and advanced data analytics approaches, including AI, this partnership will generate a unique data set to inform the development of novel therapies in the future.”

In its latest collaboration, Angelini Pharma will leverage Quiver’s technology platform to break new grounds in deeper understanding a broad set of Developmental and Epileptic Encephalopathies (DEEs). DEEs are a group of rare diseases affecting children worldwide, causing a spectrum of neurodevelopmental symptoms and severe treatment-resistant seizures linked to genetic mutations. They are often caused by gene mutations, but functional and molecular consequences of such mutations are not well understood in most cases. Despite introduction of recently approved treatments for some DEEs, there is still a pressing unmet need for more effective therapies. Quiver Bioscience's advanced platform uses human neuronal models coupled with single-cell transcriptomic resolution, optical electrophysiology, and AI to accelerate the discovery of precision therapies for these complex conditions. The ultimate goal of the partnership is to discover and develop differentiated therapeutics that can address multiple DEEs.

“We’re excited to embark on this collaboration with the excellent team at Angelini Pharma,” said Graham T. Dempsey, PhD, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Quiver Bioscience. “Together we are pursuing a novel approach uniquely enabled by Quiver’s technology platform. By leveraging altered electrophysiology in response to genetic perturbations as the core neuronal classifier and integrating paired multi-modal data, we aim to link functional phenotypes with the underlying molecular drivers. We look forward to translating this science into new medicines for a disease area in urgent need of innovation.”

“This new partnership is another step forward to advance our strategic priorities, strengthen our global presence and potentially expand our pipeline of innovative medicines and promising candidates”, said Sergio Marullo di Condojanni, Chief Executive Officer at Angelini Pharma. “It follows a number of strategic acquisitions and collaboration agreements that we have entered over the course of the past two years and will further boost our leadership and portfolio in brain health”.

Destum Partners acted as transaction advisor to Quiver Bioscience.