Recently, Lundbeck announced that it has reached an agreement with AprilBio of South Korea. According to the agreement, Lingbei has obtained the global exclusive rights to the research, development and commercialization of the latter's neuroimmune disease candidate drug APB-A1.

It is reported that APB-A1 is a new and well-differentiated anti-CD40 ligand (CD40L) antibody-like drug candidate, and it is planned to conduct a phase 1 clinical trial around the beginning of 2022. According to the terms of the agreement, Lundbeck will pay AprilBio a one-time payment of US$16 million in cash. In addition, Lundbeck will also pay up to $432 million in successful development, supervision and sales milestones related to AprilBio and APB-A1.

On October 18, Ipsen and Accent Therapeutics also announced that they have reached an exclusive global cooperation agreement to jointly promote the research, development, manufacturing and commercialization of drugs targeting the RNA-modified protein METL3. According to data, Accent's new METL3 small molecule inhibitor is designed to treat a specific subtype of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with high unmet medical needs. METTL3 is a type of RMP, and its potential as a new therapeutic target for AML has been verified in preclinical experiments.

According to the terms of the cooperation agreement, Ipsen will obtain the exclusive development rights of a METL3 small molecule inhibitor at that time. Accent may receive a total of US$446 million in advance payments, preclinical, clinical, regulatory and sales milestone payments, plus future tiered sales royalties for the product.

In addition to the above companies, many multinational pharmaceutical companies have also announced that they have invested huge sums of money and will cooperate with other companies to develop innovative drugs this year. The industry believes that this is a manifestation of multinational pharmaceutical companies' continuous betting on innovative drugs in 2021 in order to balance policies and markets. In the current increasingly fierce pharmaceutical market, most pharmaceutical companies actually use innovative drugs as a driving force for sustainable development and are spending huge amounts of money to support them. It is understood that with the domestic pharmaceutical R&D costs increasing year by year and the implementation of the "volume purchase" and other medical reform policies, local pharmaceutical companies have also moved from the past "sales rather than R&D" development model and are accelerating Towards a transitional stage. More and more local pharmaceutical companies are also increasing their investment in R&D and innovation.

Data shows that since the beginning of this year, the cost of innovative R&D input for major domestic pharmaceutical companies has continued to rise. For example, in the first half of the first half of the scientific and technological innovation board biomedical listed companies continue to increase R & D investment, the total R & D investment has reached 5.079 billion yuan, an increase of 50% from 3.387 billion yuan in the same period last year. Among them, seven companies including Junshi Biology and Cansino Biology have invested more than 100 million yuan in R&D in the first half of the year. The R&D expenses of five companies including Oriental Biology have increased by more than 100% year-on-year. The R&D expenses of Zejing Pharmaceutical and Frontier Biology The rate is over 200%. In addition to independent innovation, there are also many cases of large-scale investment in the introduction of innovative drugs and cooperation in the development of innovative drugs.

The analysis believes that, on the whole, domestic and foreign pharmaceutical companies will accelerate innovation in 2021. Judging from a series of transactions of more than hundreds of millions of dollars in the past, the industry predicts that in the future, large pharmaceutical developers will continue to be active buyers for cooperation and introduction of innovative therapies. In this context, I believe that with continuous R&D investment, more and more new drug results will continue to appear, benefiting more patients.