RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – The oncology startup Tavros Therapeutics has signed a five-year collaboration with Vividion Therapeutics that could bring as much as $430.5 million to the RTP firm.

According to a statement, the agreement between the firms aims to “discover or target four oncology targets across an initial five-year term.”

This agreement comes on the heels of Tavros closing a $7.5 million seed round last month.

“The future of cancer treatment lies in the precision targeting of therapies in the optimal clinical settings. This partnership allows Tavros to expand the actionability of our platform into a new target space by pairing our precision oncology platform with Vividion’s unmatched ability to drug the traditionally undruggable,” said Tavros CEO and co-founder Eoin McDonnell, Ph.D., in a statement.  “We’re thrilled to launch our work with Vividion and harness our combined expertise to reach patients with difficult-to-treat cancers by uncovering and drugging the next generation of high-value targets and augmenting the efficacy of emerging compounds.”

Oncology startup Tavros Therapeutics closes $7.5M second seed round

Behind the deal

Under the terms of the deal, Tavros will receive $17.5 million up front, and up to $430.5 million in milestone payments for four initial programs, as well as some royalties during the duration of the agreement.

In addition, Vividion will have the right to opt-in to additional collaboration, including up to five additional targets that could yield Tavros as much as $482 million in additional payments.

“Despite decades of effort, many targets remain inaccessible to traditional small molecule drugs, and many others have uncertain relevance to disease,” said Vividion Therapeutics CEO Jeffrey Hatfield, in a statement. “This collaboration brings together two orthogonal, highly innovative and synergistic approaches to drug discovery that will address both of these challenges. Vividion has the ability to find and drug previously unknown, or cryptic, functional binding pockets on oncology and immunology targets of high interest, while Tavros has the potential to uncover previously unknown synthetic vulnerabilities or dependencies in deadly tumor cells. We believe this powerful combination of leading-edge technologies has the potential to deliver multiple breakthrough discoveries for cancer patients in need.”

Vividion, based in San Diego, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bayer AG that was bought in August 2021.