Arena Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Beacon Discovery have entered into a strategic multi-year partnership (Project Cabrillo) aimed at developing novel medicines across a range of G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) targets.
 
Beacon will be responsible for drug discovery activities and Arena will focus on developing and commercializing promising compounds for a variety of immune and inflammatory diseases that complement their first- or best-in-class pipeline. Financial terms were not disclosed.

“Project Cabrillo expands our relationship with Beacon Discovery, allowing us to continue to unlock the value of Arena’s legacy world-class GPCR discovery engine,” said Amit D. Munshi, president and chief executive officer of Arena. “Our work will cover a broad range of novel and validated targets which we have collectively identified and look promising. We are excited to work with Beacon to discover new medicines which we hope will dramatically change the lives of patients.”

“We are thrilled to bolster our long-standing relationship with Arena and look forward to continuing our successful track record of discovering and engineering highly-optimized compounds,” said Sunny Al-Shamma, Beacon’s chief executive officer. “We are confident that our expanded partnership will result in novel best-in-disease medicines targeting the challenging treatment of autoimmune diseases.”