Flagship Pioneering and Pfizer have added Quotient into their 10-program partnership, inking a deal to discover new targets for two programs in cardiovascular and renal diseases.
The deal fits into a larger equation: Back in July 2023, Pfizer and Flagship Pioneering each put down $50 million to build a 10-program pipeline. The Big Pharma said the VC firm and its bioplatform companies could make up to $700 million in biobucks for each successful drug that emerges from the pact.
Now, Flagship-founded Quotient will work with Flagship’s drug development arm—dubbed Pioneering Medicines—to spot somatic mutations in genes that change the progression of heart and kidney diseases, according to an Aug. 28 release.
“Quotient’s somatic genomics platform explores the extensive genetic diversity within the 30 trillion cells inside our body. This offers an incredibly rich and unchartered territory for drug discovery,” Quotient CEO and co-founder Jacob Rubens, Ph.D., said in the release. Rubens is also an origination partner at Flagship Pioneering, previously helping form Flagship’s Tessera Therapeutics and Sana Biotechnology.
Quotient will use its platform to identify new links between genes and cardiovascular or renal diseases for the freshly drawn-up research programs, Rubens explained.
Flagship Pioneering launched the genomics company in 2022 and publicly unveiled the biotech a year later. The young biotech has homebases in both the U.K. and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Born out of research from teams at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the U.K. and the University of Texas Southwestern, Quotient tapped Sanger Institute founder Peter Campbell, Ph.D., to serve as the biotech’s chief scientific officer earlier this month.
Specific financial details of the deal were not disclosed, nor were specific disease indications shared, though Pfizer’s chief scientific officer of internal medicine research, Bill Sessa, Ph.D., said the pharma would keep pushing boundaries in research innovation to address remaining gaps in cardiometabolic care.
Quotient is the second publicly named Flagship offshoot unveiled as part of the Big Pharma-VC pact. This June, Pfizer and Flagship Pioneering picked obesity as the first target in the billion-dollar, multiprogram collaboration. The New York pharma giant is now working with Flagship’s ProFound Therapeutics to find new proteins and determine whether they can be used for new obesity therapeutics.
The general purpose of the programs is to address unmet needs within Pfizer’s core strategic areas of interest. The Big Pharma can pluck partnerships from Flagship’s ecosystem that currently spans 40 companies. Though Moderna is included in that network, the partnership will more likely involve companies in earlier-stage development, President of Pioneering Medicines and Flagship General Partner Paul Biondi previously told Fierce Biotech.
Editor's note: This article was updated Aug. 28 at 4:45 pm ET to clarify where Quotient is headquartered.