Theravance Advances Respiratory Program via Glaxo Partnership

A company that's raised $370 million in private money over five years yet has only one press release on its web site sounds more like an old school pharma-style operation than the standard entrepreneurial biotech start-up. Indeed, that's the case with Theravance Inc. (formerly Advanced Medicine), which was founded and is chaired by former Merck & Co. Inc. chairman and CEO Roy Vagelos, MD. That solitary press release was the announcement in January of a collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline PLC to develop a long-acting Beta2 agonist (LABA) for the treatment of respiratory disease such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) [See Deal].

Although the deal specifies that the two companies will pool their most advanced LABA candidates, the goal, according to Theravance CEO Rick Winningham, is to have a single, best-in-class inhalable LABA on the market in the second half of the decade. To accomplish that goal, Theravance is applying its "multivalence" approach to drug development, a strategy based on creating compounds that bind to their target concurrently at both primary and adjacent binding sites, which increases selectivity, binding strength, potency, and/or duration of action