Sosei Heptares Announces the First Phase I Clinical Start From Its Multi-target Drug Discovery Collaboration With Pfizer

- Dosing of first subject in clinical trial by Pfizer triggers $5 million payment to Sosei Heptares

- Clinical development candidate is an oral, small molecule modulator of an undisclosed G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) target

TOKYO and LONDON, Dec. 23, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Sosei Group Corporation ("the Company") (TSE: 4565) has been notified by its strategic alliance partner Pfizer that it has dosed the first subject in a clinical trial with a new drug candidate nominated from the multi-target drug discovery collaboration between the two companies. Achievement of this milestone triggers a payment of $5 million to Sosei Heptares. This candidate was nominated for advancement by Pfizer in May 2019 generating at that time a $3 million milestone payment.

Dr. Malcolm Weir, Executive Vice President, Research & Early Development at Sosei Heptares, said: "The productivity of our collaboration with Pfizer has been gathering real momentum in 2019 based on the synergy of the expert teams within both organizations. We are excited with this latest milestone, which sees the first candidate from this collaboration enter clinical trials. This excellent progress is also reflected more broadly across our other internal and partnered programs where it demonstrates the power of our approach to deliver molecules targeting challenging GPCRs across multiple disease areas to partners."

Charlotte Allerton, Head of Medicine Design at Pfizer said: "We are pleased with the progress achieved through our collaboration with Sosei Heptares. Sosei Heptares' GPCR-focused structure-based drug design provides us with a valuable approach to potentially enable the design of small molecules that may modulate important disease targets."

About the agreement with Pfizer Sosei Heptares and Pfizer entered a multi-target drug discovery collaboration in November 2015 to research and develop potential new medicines directed at up to ten GPCR targets across multiple therapeutic areas. Many of these targets have clinical or biological validation as key points for therapeutic intervention potentially targeting a range of diseases but have proven difficult to address with conventional discovery approaches because of inherent technical challenges.