Dive Brief:

• GSK is the latest pharmaceutical company to form a drug-hunting partnership with Flagship Pioneering, announcing Monday a deal to tap the startup incubator’s portfolio to find new medicines and vaccines.
• Flagship and GSK have committed up to $150 million to fund the effort, through which the British drugmaker hopes to find up to 10 new medicines or shots. GSK will have an exclusive option to license those prospects, with Flagship and its startups eligible for up to $720 million in milestone payments per program, as well as unspecified preclinical funding and sales royalties.
• The deal closely resembles another alliance Flagship struck with Pfizer last year, as well as other recent collaborations with Novo Nordisk and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. The Novo and Pfizer deals have already led to subsequent partnerships with Flagship companies.

Dive Insight:

With more than 40 biotech startups in its portfolio, Flagship has access to a broad selection of drug technologies and potential medicines.

The partners are starting out looking for respiratory or immunological disease medicines, both of which are core areas of GSK’s drug research. That first step will involve what the two companies called “an exploration phase” to identify “the most promising concepts” for further study, after which GSK will get the chance at multiple licensing deals.

"Together with Flagship, we will use science and technology to deliver best-in-class innovation at pace,” Tony Wood, GSK’s chief scientific officer, said in a statement.

The alliance is the latest in a recent streak of business development activity for GSK, which this year acquired startups Elsie Biotechnologies and Aiolos Bio, reworked a vaccine alliance with CureVac and licensed a cancer drug from Hansoh Pharma. But it is also validation for an unorthodox initiative Flagship has undertaken to draw pharma companies to its biotech startups, many of which are built around broad drugmaking platforms.

That initiative, dubbed Pioneering Medicines, enables large drugmakers to tap into Flagship’s network, pick out ideas its startups may not have time to pursue and advance them via partnerships. It spawned two deals Novo cut in January with Flagship-backed Omega Therapeutics and Cellarity, as well as a collaboration Pfizer last month formed with startup ProFound Therapeutics.

Those deals help startups get additional cash to fund their research, while giving larger companies a chance to restock their pipelines — a particularly large need given the number of key patent expirations many face this decade.

“Today's news is yet another step in demonstrating the transformative potential of our Innovation Supply Chain Partnership model,” Paul Biondi, a general partner at Flagship and president of the Pioneering Medicines initiative, wrote in a LinkedIn post.