Roche And Bind Therapeutics Announce Nanomedicine Collaboration

Roche and Bind Therapeutics have announced a new research collaboration to discover new treatments for diseases outside of oncology.

Bind Therapeutics, which is based out of Cambridge and primarily focuses on developing programmable drugs to certain forms of cancer, is currently working on developing a precise nanomedicines drug delivery platform. The drug delivery platform is designed to target specific cells and tissues, making it more effective and safer than taking a drug orally or intravenously. In particular, this delivery platform aims to minimize the damages that can occur on healthy tissues following treatment by focusing the drug payload directly on the site of the disease. In the agreement with Roche, Bind Therapeutics will be using its drug delivery platform in conjunction with Roche drug payloads to effectively deliver drugs to patients.

Scott Minick, Bind’s CEO, spoke about the agreement between the two companies. “The addition of Roche, a global leader and innovator, to our family of collaborators underscores Bind’s unique, leading position in the field of nanomedicine,” he said. “By combining Bind’s Medicinal Nanoengineering platform with Roche’s deep expertise in disease areas with high unmet medical need, this agreement further validates the wide-ranging potential for our technology and facilitates extending our platform into new therapeutic areas.”

In addition to the drug delivery platform, Bind Therapeutics is also working on its own drug candidate for non-small cell lung cancer and metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer.

The Bind-Roche agreement is not an exclusive one, as Bind also has agreements with Amgen, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca to use their drug payloads in Bind’s drug delivery platform. The research for Bind’s nanotechnology originally started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

Neither party disclosed the financial aspects of the deal.