FORMA Therapeutics Collaborates with Cubist Pharmaceuticals to Discover and Develop Novel Antibacterial Drugs

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FORMA Therapeutics announced today that it has signed a collaboration agreement with Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Inc. to leverage FORMA’s transformative chemistry platform to discover novel antibacterial compounds for development by Cubist. FORMA will receive an upfront payment, equity investment, payments for compounds delivered and research funding over the 3-year collaboration term totaling up to $14 million and is eligible to receive up to an additional $54 million in milestones plus royalties on programs that Cubist elects to move into development and commercialization.

“We are very excited to be collaborating with FORMA to access their expertise in novel chemistry to address the large unmet medical need in the area of antibacterial drug resistance, such as methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and gram negative infections.”

“Working collaboratively with Cubist will allow us to demonstrate the power of FORMA’s unique discovery platform to address the urgent need for new chemical matter in the field of antibacterial research,” said Steven Tregay, CEO of FORMA.

Steven Gilman, CSO/SVP Discovery and Non-Clinical Development of Cubist said, “We are very excited to be collaborating with FORMA to access their expertise in novel chemistry to address the large unmet medical need in the area of antibacterial drug resistance, such as methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and gram negative infections.”

About FORMA’s Integrated Drug Discovery Platform

FORMA is uniquely positioned through its unprecedented combination of technological capabilities and oncology expertise to access novel target space and to develop a new generation of breakthrough oncology drugs. Some of the key features of FORMA’s discovery capabilities include:

• Versatile cell-based screening platform which allows the screening of discrete targets in cells and quantitative genome/proteome-wide profiling and target identification.

• Accessing new chemical space through structure guided drug discovery (SGDD) approaches leveraging proprietary computational and structural biology combined with our integrated chemistry platform which incorporates Diversity Orientated Synthesis (DOS). DOS combines the high stereochemical and structural diversity found in natural products with traditional combinatorial chemistry techniques. This approach has been proven to work for challenging targets and allows the rapid optimization of lead therapeutic candidates.

FORMA Therapeutics is integrating transformative biology and chemistry to unlock the best targets and pathways that genomics medicine has revealed. FORMA builds on the vision of its academic founders: Stuart Schreiber, Todd Golub, Michael Foley, each of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and leverages its innovative drug discovery platform to address challenging targets and develop a robust internal pipeline of targeted breakthrough oncology drugs. FORMA is a global company headquartered in Cambridge, MA with additional research operations in Connecticut, Singapore and Beijing. www.formatherapeutics.com