SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA I January 14, 2014 I Carmot Therapeutics announced today that it has entered into a collaboration and license agreement with Amgen, Inc. (Thousand Oaks, CA). During the collaboration Carmot will apply its proprietary Chemotype Evolution to discover novel drug leads for two targets selected by Amgen. Carmot and Amgen will work together to identify and optimize drug candidates, while Amgen will be solely responsible for their clinical development.

Under the terms of the agreement, Carmot will receive an upfront payment, research funding, and pre-clinical and clinical milestone payments. In addition, a royalty will be paid on commercial sales of products emerging from the collaboration.

“This collaboration with Amgen, one of the world’s largest and most successful biotech companies, is a significant milestone for Carmot and a recognition of the potential of Chemotype Evolution. We look forward to working with the excellent scientific team at Amgen to tackle two challenging therapeutic targets with significant market potential,” said Carmot CEO, Dr. Stig K. Hansen.

About Carmot Therapeutics, Inc.

Carmot is pioneering a transformative drug discovery approach, Chemotype Evolution, to identify superior therapeutics for human diseases. Chemotype Evolution is a proprietary technology that dramatically expands the repertoire of chemical diversity for drug discovery, providing the opportunity to tackle therapeutic targets refractory to traditional approaches. Carmot is using Chemotype Evolution to identify and optimize innovative drugs for difficult therapeutic targets, thereby addressing important unmet chemical needs.

Founded by Drs. Stig K. Hansen and Daniel A. Erlanson, Carmot has built a powerful discovery approach based on Chemotype Evolution that can rapidly and efficiently unlock novel, diverse, chemical space that is difficult to access by conventional small molecule discovery technologies. Carmot is using Chemotype Evolution to discover novel drug candidates targeting validated pathways in metabolic disease, oncology and inflammation.

SOURCE: Carmot Therapeutics