City Therapeutics Enters Strategic Collaboration with Bausch + Lomb

Gunderson Dettmer represented client City Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company leading the future of RNA interference (RNAi)-based medicine, in its strategic collaboration with Bausch + Lomb, a global eye health leader focused on the development of a novel therapy for the treatment of retinal diseases including geographic atrophy (GA), an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) that causes irreversible vision loss.  Through the collaboration, City Therapeutics will leverage its next-generation RNAi engineering technologies to develop a novel RNAi clinical candidate toward a specific disease target for intravitreal administration.

Under terms of the collaboration, City Therapeutics has received an upfront cash payment and, if Bausch + Lomb elects to pursue a candidate for further development, City Therapeutics is also eligible to receive contingent payments tied to development, regulatory, commercial and sales milestones of up to $485 million, as well as tiered royalty payments on net product sales.

In the announcement of the strategic collaboration, City Therapeutics CEO Andy Orth said, “We are excited to collaborate with Bausch + Lomb’s team of eye health experts, who share our vision to expand the reach of RNAi-based medicines for people living with serious unmet medical needs such as GA. We look forward to delivering a new treatment option for the more than one million people in the U.S. living with GA. For City Therapeutics, this marks our first major corporate collaboration, and it enables significant funding to advance our platform of innovative RNAi trigger molecules for broader applications in ophthalmologic diseases.”

The Gunderson Dettmer team was led by Brendan McCarthy and included Brittany Nicely.

Companies
City Therapeutics
Bausch + Lomb