Cerevance to concurrently out-license one discovery-stage program
Boston, MA – AUGUST 9, 2022 – Cerevance, a private, clinical-stage drug discovery and development
company focused on central nervous system (CNS) diseases, today announced a multi-year strategic
research collaboration with Merck, known as MSD outside the United States and Canada, to identify novel
targets for Alzheimer’s disease utilizing Cerevance’s proprietary Nuclear Enriched Transcript Sort
sequencing (NETSseq) technology platform. Cerevance will concurrently out-license one discovery-stage
program to Merck as part of the collaboration.
Under the terms of the agreement, Cerevance will receive a $25 million upfront payment and is eligible
to receive development and commercial milestone payments totaling approximately $1.1B, in addition to
potential royalties on sales of approved products derived from the collaboration.
“The establishment of this collaboration with Merck, which comes on the heels of our positive Phase 2
data for CVN424 in patients with Parkinson’s disease, represents a significant milestone for Cerevance
and reinforces the promise of our NETSseq technology platform,” said Mark Carlton, Ph.D., chief scientific
officer of Cerevance. “We believe we are well-positioned to identify novel targets for neurodegenerative
diseases and look forward to collaborating with Merck to potentially bring forward transformative
therapeutics for patients with Alzheimer’s disease.”
“Progress in our understanding of the biology of neurodegenerative diseases continues to reveal
compelling new mechanisms for potential therapeutic intervention,” said Jason M. Uslaner, Ph.D., vice
president and head of neuroscience discovery, Merck Research Laboratories. “We look forward to
advancing the discovery program as well as taking advantage of the NETSseq platform to identify new
targets with the team at Cerevance.”
To date, Cerevance’s NETSseq technology platform has isolated and allowed for analysis of specific cell
populations in thousands of post-mortem, healthy and diseased human brain tissue samples across a
range of ages and brain regions. These analyses of human brain tissue can expose biological pathways
underlying neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases that would be difficult to see in animal models or
differentiated human stem cells. As a result, Cerevance’s platform can reveal novel therapeutic targets
that can be modulated to correct neural circuitry or slow the disease process.
About Cerevance
Cerevance is a private pharmaceutical company whose lead therapeutic, CVN424, a first-in-class, oral,
non-dopaminergic compound acting on a novel target (GPR6), recently demonstrated significant and
clinically meaningful efficacy in a 135-patient Phase 2 study in patients with Parkinson’s disease. The
company uses its proprietary NETSseq technology platform to highly selectively identify novel target
proteins that are either over- or under-expressed in diseased brains. Partnering with over 20 brain banks
and evaluating more than 11,000 human post-mortem brain tissue samples, Cerevance is advancing a
robust pipeline of targeted treatments for patients with neurodegenerative diseases, including
Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. For additional information, please visit
www.cerevance.com.
Contacts
Cerevance:
Johnna Simoes, ir@cerevance.com
Media:
Andrew Mielach, amielach@lifescicomms.com, +1-646-876-5868