Ablynx has achieved an initial discovery milestone with a multi-specific Nanobody construct as part of its collaboration with Novo Nordisk, triggering a €1 million payment to Ablynx.

Under the terms of the agreement, entered November 2015, Ablynx received an upfront license fee of €5 million and will receive as much as €4 million in research funding during the initial three-year research term. Ablynx is also eligible to receive potential development, regulatory and commercial milestones of as much as €182 million plus royalties on sales. Novo Nordisk is responsible for development, manufacturing and commercialization of any resulting products.

Dr. Edwin Moses, chief executive officer of Ablynx, said, “Our proprietary Nanobody technology platform is ideally suited to develop multi-specific Nanobody candidates that address multiple targets in a single drug molecule. The achievement of our first milestone just one year after we entered into the collaboration with Novo Nordisk is an endorsement of the power of our platform to rapidly generate novel, potent drug candidates against disease targets which are difficult to address with other technologies. We are looking forward to further advancing the program and the Nanobody potentially progressing towards clinical studies in 2018.”